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THE  PEOPLE'S  BOOKS 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


ETHICS 

By  thk  TIEV^  HASTINGS  RASIIDALL 

D.LiTT.,  D.C.L.,  LL.D 

FELLOW  OF  THE  BRITISH  AOADEMY  ;   CANON  RESIDENTIARY  OP  HEREFORD 
FELLOW  ANL  LECTURER  OF  NEW  COLLEGE,  OXFORD 


I.  ()  N  I)  O  N  :  T.  C.  &  E.  C.  J  A  C  K 
67  LONG  ACRE,  W.C.,  AND  EDIXIUJRGII 
NEW     YORK  :     DODGE     PUBLISHING     CO. 


loo 


looS 


PREFACE 


-   It  is  scarcely  possible  for  anyone  who  has  written  a 
"t  large  book  on  a  subject  to  write  a  smaller  one  a  few 
^    years  later  without,  to  a  considerable  extent,  repeating 
^  himself.     This  Httle  book  is  necessarily  little  more  than 
^     a  condensation  of  my  Theory  of  Good  and  Evil.     I  have 
M-.  never  written  with  that  work  before  me,  but  I  have  not 
^  taken  any  particular  pains  to  avoid  repeating  expres- 
'    sions  or  illustrations  which  occur  in  the  larger  book. 
'*^  There  are,  however,  some  criticisms  upon  a  recent  phase 
of  Emotional  Ethics  which  have  not  appeared  before. 
This  explanation  seems  desirable  to  prevent  anyone  who 
has  already  read  the  Theory  of  Good  and  Evil  expecting 
to  find  much  that  is  new,  while  it  gives  me  the  oppor- 
tunity of  referring  to  that  work  any  reader  wha  wants 
further  explanation  of  the  positions  here  taken  up  or 
answers  to  objections  which  will  naturally  present  them- 
selves.    V\Tiile  I  have  tried  in  this  volume  not  to  conceal 
difficulties  or  to  save  the  student  from  the  labour  of 
thought,  I  have  endeavoured  to  make  it  a  really  ele- 
mentary introduction  to  the  subject. 

H.  R. 


m 


CONTENTS 


CHAP. 

I.    INTRODUCTORY 


II.    THE   RIGHT,    THE    GOOD,    AND   THE   PLEASANT 

III.  THE   MORAL   CONSCIOUSNESS       . 

IV.  THE   MORAL   CRITERION      .... 
V.    MORALITY  AND   RELIGION 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 


PA^E 

5 
12 
30 
45 

78 
95 


ETHICS 

CHAPTER    I 

INTRODUCTORY 

An  exact  definition  of  the  scope  or  subject-matter  of  a 
Science  is  generally  reached  only  at  a  late  stage  of  its 
development,  and  the  individual  student  will  hkeuise 
get  a  clearer  conception  of  what  the  Science  is  when  he 
knows  something  of  its  subject-matter  than  he  can 
possibly  obtain  from  any  formal  definition  with  which 
he  may  be  presented  at  the  outset  of  his  studies.  I  shall 
not  therefore  attempt  at  the  present  moment  any  very 
elaborate  account  of  the  scope  or  aim  of  Ethics,  but 
will  content  myself  with  saying  that  it  deals  with  the 
nature  of  Morality.  We  all  use  the  terms  good  and 
evil,  right  and  ^\Tong.  The  question  is  \^'hat  we  mean 
or  ought  to  mean  by  these  terms — what  is  the  real 
meaning  and  nature  of  "  good  "  or  "  right  "  ?  Ethics 
or  (to  use  the  older  term)  Moral  Philosophy  is  a  Science 
which  deals  with  all  the  questions  which  can  possibly 
be  raised  about  the  good  and  the  right.  In  particular 
it  will  be  found  that  the  general  question  breaks  itself 
up  into  three  main  enquiries  : 

(1)  What  is  the  general  nature  of  good  or  evil,  right 
and  wrong — ^^•hat  at  bottom  do  we  mean  when  we 
pronounce  such  and  such  a  thing  to  be  good,  such  and 
such  an  act  to  be  right  ? 

(2)  Assuming  that  there  is  some  real  meanuig  in  the 
terms,  that  they  do  correspond  to  some  real  distinction 


6  ETHICS 

in  the  nature  of  things,  the  question  arises,  "  By  what 
part  of  our  nature,  by  which  of  the  various  activities 
or  capacities  of  the  human  mind  do  we  recognize  these 
distinctions  ?  "  What,  at  bottom,  are  the  judgements 
that  we  usually  call  moral  judgements  ?  Are  they 
merely  attempts  to  express  in  words  a  particular  kind 
of  feeUng  or  emotion,  or  are  they  a  specific  kind  of 
intellectual  judgement  ?  Or  are  they  neither  the  one  nor 
the  other — neither  feeling  nor  thought  nor  any  com- 
bination of  the  two,  but  something  absolutely  sui 
generis  ?  This  question  may  conveniently  be  called  the 
question  of  the  Moral  Faculty. 

(3)  Granting  that  we  know  what  in  a  general  way  we 
mean  by  calling  an  act  right  or  wrong,  there  arises  the 
further  question,  "  How  can  we  find  out  what  particular 
acts  are  right  and  what  acts  are  wTong  ?  By  ^hat 
principle  are  we  or  ought  we  to  be  guided  in  calling 
particular  acts  right  or  wTong  ?  "  This  question  is 
generally  known  as  the  question  of  the  Moral  Criterion. 

We  shall  find  that  these  three  questions  are  far  from 
representing  three  separate  and  distinct  enquiries.  They 
are  really  aspects  of  one  and  the  same  fundamental 
problem  ;  but  the  questions  have  not  always  presented 
themselves  in  this  way,  and  it  wiU  tend  to  clearness  if 
we  discuss  them  separately,  and  in  the  order  indicated. 
Before  proceeding  to  do  so,  it  will  be  well  to  say  a 
word  as  to  the  relation  of  our  Science  to  certain  other 
Sciences  with  which  it  is  closely  connected. 

The  Science  of  Psychology  deals  with  all  the  activi- 
ties or  aspects  of  our  mental  life — sensation,  feehng, 
emotion,  thought,  volition.  It  aims  at  distinguishing 
these  various  sides  of  our  mental  nature,  and  discover- 
ing everything  that  can  be  discovered  about  them 
considered  simply  as  facts  of  experience.  It  is  clear 
that,  since  moral  emotions,  moral  judgements,  moral 
ideas  are  part  of  our  mental  life,  they  must  from  one 


INTRODUCTORY  7 

point  of  view  fall  within  the  province  of  Psychology, 
and  attempts  have  often  been  made  to  treat  Ethics 
simply  as  a  branch  of  that  Science.  But  this  is  possible 
only  from  the  point  of  view  of  those  who  deny  any  real 
truth  or  validity  to  such  ideas  as  "  ought,"  "  right," 
"  wrong."  A  knowledge  of  psychological  facts  must 
obviously  be  the  basis  of  any  sound  system  of  Ethics  : 
it  must  sujiply  the  data  for  Ethics,  since  all  that  we 
know  about  right  and  wrong  is  derived  from  the  facts 
of  conscious  life,  but  it  can  never  take  the  place  of 
Ethics.  Psychology  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  truth 
or  validity  of  our  thoughts  or  ideas  ;  for  Psychology  an 
erroneous  judgement  or  a  logical  fallacy  is  just  as  much 
a  fact  as  a  true  judgement  or  a  valid  inference.  Psycho- 
logy as  such  knows  of  no  distinction  between  them ;  it 
has  got  to  explain  their  occurrence  as  so  many  events 
in  time  related  in  certain  constant  ways  to  other  events. 
Directly  we  raise  the  question  of  validity,  we  enter 
upon  the  province  of  Logic.  Equally  little  has  Psycho- 
logy to  do  with  the  validity  of  our  ethical  judgements. 
Whether  I  am  or  am  not  capable  of  desiring  something 
besides  pleasure,  whether  I  have  or  have  not  a  sense  of 
duty,  whether  there  is  or  is  not  such  a  thing  as  a  "  sense 
of  obligation  "  in  my  mind — these  are  no  doubt  ques- 
tions for  the  Psychologist  to  consider,  and  it  is  of  the 
utmost  importance  for  Ethics  that  they  should  be  de- 
cided rightly  ;  but  the  question  whether  I  ought  to 
desire  something  besides  pleasure,  whether  there  is  any 
truth  or  validity  in  my  idea  of  duty,  whether  there  is 
anything  m  the  nature  of  things  corresponding  to  the 
sense  of  obligation,  or  whether,  on  the  other  hand,  such 
ideas  as  duty  or  moral  obligation  are  as  much  subjective 
fictions  as  the  notion  of  a  chimera  or  of  a  fairy — these 
are  questions  about  which  the  Psychologist  as  such 
has  nothing  to  say.  The  question  of  validity  is  for 
another  Science.    From  this  point  of  view  Ethics  (like 


8  ETHICS 

Logic  and  Esthetics  (the  Science  of  the  Beautiful),  is 
sometimes  called  a  normative  Science — since  it  does  not 
deal  simply  with  matters  of  fact,  but  aims  at  providing 
a  "norm"  or  pattern,  which  our  judgements  and  our 
actions  ought  to  follow.  The  phrase  undoubtedly  cor- 
responds to  a  real  distinction  between  these  Sciences 
and  any  branch  of  Natural  Science  ;  but  it  must  not 
be  taken  to  imply  that  in  these  Sciences  we  are  not 
dealing  with  real  matters  of  fact  or  objective  truth. 
If  the  distinctions  "  true  and  false,"'  "  right  and  wrong," 
"  beautiful  and  ugly "  are  really  vahd  distinctions, 
i.e.  if  moral  and  aesthetic  judgements  admit  of  any  abso- 
lute truth  or  falsehood,  the}'  express  facts  about  the 
ultimate  nature  of  Reality  as  much  as  the  Sciences 
which  deal  with  matters  of  a  physical  or  a  psychological 
character. 

The  Science  of  Metaphysic  deals  with  the  most  ulti- 
mate of  all  questions — the  ultimate  nature  of  Reahty, 
of  Being  and  of  Knowing,  and  of  the  relation  between 
them.  From  one  point  of  view  it  might  seem  that 
Ethics,  being  concerned  not  with  Reality  in  general  but 
with  one  particular  department  or  aspect  of  Reality,  has 
no  closer  connection  with  Metaphysic  than  any  other 
of  the  special  Sciences,  each  of  which  deals  with  some 
special  department  or  aspect  of  Reality— Mathematics 
with  quantity  and  number,  Physics  with  mass  and 
motion,  Chemistry  with  the  ultimate  composition  of 
material  things,  &c.  But  the  ideas  of  good  and  evil, 
if  valid  at  all,  represent  such  a  very  important  aspect 
of  Reality  in  general,  and  our  views  about  them  depend 
so  closely  upon  our  theory  about  the  ultimate  nature 
of  Reality  in  general  and  the  nature  and  validity  of 
knowledge  in  general,  that  in  practice  it  is  scarcely 
possible  to  keep  the  subjects  altogether  apart.  No 
thorough -going  discussion  as  to  the  nature  of  Reality 
in  general  can  fail  to  give  some  account  of  the  parti- 


INTRODUCTORY  9 

cular  aspect  of  Reality  which  is  expressed  by  the  terms 
'■  right  and  wrong,"  "  good  and  evil  "  ;  no  thorough- 
going account  of  the  nature  of  Morality  can  fail  to 
connect  itself  very  closely  with  a  general  theory  of  the 
Universe.  Hence  no  great  Metaphysician  has  failed  to 
deal  in  some  way,  however  incidentally,  with  Ethics, 
while  the  greatest  writers  on  Ethics  have  also  been 
writers  on  general  Metaphysics  or  Philosophy.^  There 
are,  however,  some  special  questions  connected  with 
Ethics  which  have  no  very  close  connection  with  Meta- 
physics— notably  the  question  of  the  Moral  Criterion, 
and  this  question  has  often  been  neglected  by  those 
who  have  regarded  Ethics  merely  as  a  branch  of  Meta- 
physics. Questions  of  classification  are  in  the  main 
questions  of  convenience.  Ethics  may  best  be  regarded 
as  a  branch  of  Philosophy  (and  this  fact  recommends 
the  use  of  the  old-fashioned  term  Moral  Philosophy), 
but  as  a  special  branch  of  it,  distinct  from,  though  very 
closely  connected  with.  Metaphysics. 

There  is  one  very  practical  reason  why  it  is  impossible 
to  deal  with  Ethics  without  raising  metaphysical  ques- 
tions. It  might  no  doubt  be  possible  to  assume  that 
we  can  trust  our  moral  ideas,  and  to  go  on  to  enquire 
what  in  detail  these  ideas  are  ;  just  as  the  Geometrician 
assumes  that  there  are  such  things  as  space  and  quantity, 
and  that  we  know  in  a  general  way  what  they  are,  and 
proceeds  to  analyse  our  actual  notions  about  them  in 
detail.  But  there  is  this  difficulty  ui  the  way  of  adopt- 
ing a  similar  attitude  in  dealing  with  Ethics.  It  would 
certainly  be  held  by  many  philosophers  that  there  are 
systems  of  Metaphysic  which  undermine  the  validity 

*  The  term  Philosophy  is  penerally  omployed  to  denote  the 
whole  group  of  Philosophical  Sciences — Logic,  Ethics,  j¥>sthetics, 
Politics,  Sociology,  perhaps  Psychology — as  well  as  Metaphysic, 
but  Metaphysic  may  be  described  as  par  eoccellrnce  the  Philosophical 
Science,  and  the  terra  Philosophy  is  sometimes  used  practically  to 
mean  Metaphysic. 


10  ETHICS 

of  all  our  knowledge  and  reduce  the  conclusions  of 
Science  to  mere  subjective  illusions.  But  in  practice 
such  speculations  exercise  Httle  or  no  influence  upon 
the  respect  with  which  the  positive  or  physical  Sciences 
are  treated,  even  by  the  upholders  of  such  sceptical 
or  destructive  philosophies.  A  teacher  of  Aiithmetic 
may  be  in  Philosophy  a  disciple  of  Hume  or  !Mill,  and  as 
such  may  declare  that  it  is  not  absolutely  certain  that 
2  +  2  =  4,  but  in  practice  he  would  never  think  of  sparing 
the  rod  if  one  of  his  pupils  did  his  sums  on  that  prin- 
ciple. In  Ethics  unfortunately  it  cannot  be  assumed 
that  speculative  views  as  to  the  ultimate  basis  of  the 
Science  exercise  no  influence  upon  men's  practical  atti- 
tude towards  its  conclusions.  The  validity  of  our  ethical 
thinking  is  often  explicitly  denied  on  what  are  really 
metaphysical  grounds,  and  a  full  and  complete  answer 
to  such  doubts  or  denials  cannot  be  given  without  going 
into  metaphysical  discussions.  We  cannot  establish  the 
vahdity  of  one  particular  kind  of  thinking  without  dis- 
cussing the  nature  and  vahdity  of  all  thinking  ;  and 
historically  there  has  generally  been  the  closest  possible 
coimection — all  the  closer  in  proportion  as  the  thinker 
is  consistent  and  thorough-going — between  a  philo- 
sopher's views  on  Ethics  and  his  theory  of  the  Universe 
in  general.  In  the  present  little  work,  however,  there 
Avill  be  no  room  for  much  discussion  of  these  ultimate 
questions.  Metaphysical  questions  will  be  as  far  as 
possible  avoided  ;  but  there  will  be  no  attempt  to  pre- 
sent the  reader  with  an  Ethic  which  does  not — for 
those  who  think  the  matter  out  to  the  bottom — involve 
metaphysical  implications  or  consequences.  We  shall 
be  occupied  mainly  with  asking  what  we  actually  do 
think  about  this  particular  department  of  Reahty ; 
while,  in  answer  to  doubts  as  to  whether  our  thinking 
is  valid,  we  shall  have  for  the  most  part  to  be  content 
with  as  much  Metaphysic  as  is  imphed  m  pointing  out 


INTRODUCTORY  11 

that  there  is  no  more  reason  for  doubting  the  truth  or 
vaUdity  of  our  thought  about  right  and  wrong  than  for 
doubting  the  vaUdity  of  any  other  department  of  our 
knowle<lge.  For  more  detailed  discussion  of  such  ulti- 
mate doubts  the  reader  must  be  referred  to  works 
expHcitly  deaUng  with  Logic  and  Metaphysic. 

In  saying  that  Ethics  is  connected  in  the  closest  pos- 
sible way  ■with  Metaphysic,  we  have  implied  in  effect 
that  it  is  not  unconnected  with  Theology  ;  for  Theology 
is,  from  the  scientific  point  of  view,  only  another  name 
for  Metaphysic  or  one  particular  branch  or  aspect  of 
Metaphysic  .1  For  the  reasons  already  given,  ideas  of 
right  and  Avrong  cannot  but  be  affected  by  our  concep- 
tion of  the  nature  of  the  Universe  in  general  ;  and  the 
question  whether  there  is  a  God  and  what  is  His  nature 
is  the  most  fundamental  question  that  we  can  ask  about 
the  nature  of  the  Universe.  What  is  the  exact  char- 
acter of  this  connection  between  the  two  Sciences, 
what  is  the  bearing  of  Ethics  upon  Theology  and  of 
Theology  upon  Ethics,  are  questions  which  had  best  be 
considered  later  on.  Meanwhile,  I  ^W11  only  say  that  in 
our  enquiry  as  to  the  nature  of  right  and  ^ATong,  we 
shall  make  no  theological  assumptions.  We  shall  start 
simply  with  this  fact  of  experience — that  we  do  as  a 
matter  of  fact  give  moral  judgements,  that  we  call  and 
think  acts  right  and  wrong,  and  proceed  to  ask  what  at 
bottom  we  mean  by  so  doing,  and  what  are  the  things  or 
actions  to  which  we  apply  or  ought  to  apply  these  terms. 
The  answer  we  give  to  this  question  may  be  of  great 
importance  for  our  general  conception  of  Reality  ;  but 
we  shall  start  Mith  no  assumptions  as  to  that  Reality 
except    \\hat   is    implied   in    the    ordinary,    generally 

1  In  practice  Theology  is  usuallv  held  to  include  the  history  of 
one  or  all  of  the  great  historical  Religions,  their  doctrines  and 
their  literature,  even  when  the  philosophical  point  of  view  is  not 
ignored  altogether. 


12  ETHICS 

acknowledged  facts  of  human  life.  Let  us  proceed, 
then,  with  our  enquiry  into  the  ultimate  nature  of  these 
famihar  distinctions. 


CHAPTER    II 

THE  EIGHT,  THE  GOOD,  AND  THE  PLEASANT 

We  have  so  far  assumed  that  Ethics  is  concerned  with 
the  conception  both  of  the  good  and  of  the  right  without 
determining  exactly  the  relation  between  the  two  ideas. 
We  shall  perhaps  find  that  ultimately  the  two  notions 
involve  one  another ;  but  there  is  this  prima  facie 
difierence  between  them.  The  term  "  good  "  is  apphcable 
to  many  things  besides  human  action  ;  the  term  "  right  " 
can  only  be  applied  to  actions.  We  can  and  do  pro- 
nounce many  things  to  be  good  besides  human  acts — 
things  which  may  or  may  not  be  due  to  voluntary 
action.  We  do  commonly  think  of  right  acts  as  good  ; 
but  we  may  also  say  that  pleasure  or  knowledge  are  good, 
no  matter  whether  they  are  thought  to  be  caused  by 
anyone  or  not ;  only  voluntary  acts  can  be  called  right. 
Now  the  Science  of  Ethics  is  concerned — at  least  prima- 
rily— with  conduct ;  and  so  far  our  primary  concern  is 
with  the  meaning  of  the  right  or  of  what  we  commonly 
call  "  duty."  The  question  then  arises  whether  this 
notion  is  something  distinctive  (or  sui  generis)  or  whether 
it  can  be  resolved  into  any  other  conception.  Now 
that  is  a  question  ^yhich  can  only  be  ascertained  by 
introspection.  We  must  ask  whether  we  do  or  do  not 
possess  a  distinctive  idea  of  duty  which  is  irresolvable 
into  anything  more  ultimate.  I  beheve  that  we  do  find 
in  our  minds  such  a  distinct  conception.  This  is  at 
bottom  the  meaning  of  Kant's  famous  assertion  that 
Duty  is  a  Categorical  Imperative,^  whatever  may  be 

^  A  Categorical  Imperative  is  opposed  by  Kant  to  a  Hypothetical 
Imperative.     By  a  Hypothetical  Imperative  he  means  a  command 


THE    GOOD    AND    THE    PLEASANT     13 

thought  of  some  of  the  doctrines  which  were  associated 
with  that  formula  in  the  mind  of  the  author.  We  may 
identify  the  word  Duty  with  "  the  right  "  or  "  the 
reasonable  "  or  "  the  conduct  that  is  categorically  com- 
manded," or  the  like,  but  such  expressions  are  mere 
synonyms,  not  definitions.  They  all  express  the  same 
fundamental  notion.  If  "  right  "  and  "  wrong  "  are 
ultimate  notions,  they  cannot  be  defined  in  terms  which 
do  not  imply  them,  any  more  than  such  terms  as 
"being,"  "equal,"  "greater,"  "space,"  "cause," 
"  quality,"  "  quantity."  "  I  am  aw^are,"  says  Henry 
Sidgwick,  "  that  some  persons  will  be  disposed  to  answer 
all  the  preceding  argument  [as  to  the  nature  of  ethical 
judgements]  by  a  simple  denial  that  they  can  find  in 
their  consciousness  any  such  unconditional  or  cate- 
gorical imperative  as  I  have  been  trying  to  exhibit. 
If  that  is  really  the  filnal  result  of  self-examination  in 
any  case,  there  is  no  more  to  be  said.  I,  at  least,  do 
not  know  how  to  impart  that  idea  of  moral  obUgation 
to  anyone  who  is  entirely  devoid  of  it."  ^ 

There  arises  the  further  question  whether  this  idea  is 
intelligible  by  itself,  or  whether  it  does  not  involve  the 
further  notion  of  good.  This  will  depend  upon  the 
answer  we  give  to  the  question  how  we  ascertain  what 
particular  actions  are  right — whether  particular  acts  can 
be  seen  to  be  right  apart  altogether  from  their  conse- 
quences, or  whether  the  only  acts  which  we  can  regard 

to  do  a  certain  act  on  a  condition,  i.e.  as  a  means  to  some  end  :  "  do 
this  if  you  desire  happiness,"  or  "  if  you  want  to  be  perfect,"  or 
"  if  you  want  to  s;o  to  Heaven."  If  I  do  not  happen  to  desire  the 
end,  there  is  for  me  no  obligation  to  adopt  the  means.  The  use 
of  the  term  "  Cateprorical  Imperative"  does  not  (as  will  be  seen 
from  what  follows  in  the  text)  necessarily  imply  that  the  act  is 
not  done  for  the  sake  of  a  further  end  (though  Kant  himself  at  times 
assumes  that  such  is  the  case>,  but  it  does  imply  that  the  end  to 
which  the  act  is  a  means  is  one  which  all  rational  beings  as  such 
are  bound  to  pursue. 

»  The  Methods  of  Ethin,  6th  ed.,  p.  35. 


14  ETHICS 

as  right  are  acts  which  conduce  to  the  good.  To  hold 
this  last  view  does  not  at  all  involve  giving  up  the  dis- 
tinctive or  sui  generis  character  of  the  idea  of  right  or 
duty.  For  both  notions  really  involve  the  fundamental 
conception  of  an  "  ought."  If  we  accept  this  view,  we 
shall  say  that  the  notion  of  good  is  the  notion  of  some- 
thing which  ought  to  be  or  which  possesses  intrinsic 
value  ;  the  notion  "  right  "  will  then  imply  a  voluntary 
act  which  ought  to  be  done  as  a  means  to  this  ultimate 
good,  whatever  that  may  be.  The  two  terms  will  be 
correlative  terms  which  mutually  imply  one  another 
(just  as  the  convex  impHes  the  concave,  or  as  the  term 
'•  father  "  is  only  mteUigible  if  we  know  the  meaning  of 
"  son  ")  :  right  acts  ^^i]l  then  mean  acts  which  are  means 
to  the  good  ;  ^  the  good  wiU  mean  an  end  which  ought 
to  be  reahzed,  and  which  every  right  voluntary  action 
tends  to  reaUze.  We  may  postpone  for  the  present  the 
question  whether  these  two  terms  do  stand  in  this  rela- 
tion to  one  another,  and  concern  ourselves  only  with 
the  more  fundamental  question  whether  the  idea  of 
"  rightness  "  impHed  in  both  terms  is  a  valid  one.^ 

Now  w  hen  we  are  concerned  -with  the  existence  or  the 
validity  of  some  ultimate  concept  or  (as  it  is  sometimes 
called)  "  category  "  of  human  thought,  the  only  argu- 
ment that  can  be  used  is  to  appeal  to  one's  own  actual 
consciousness,  and  to  the  consciousness  of  other  people 
so  far  as  that  is  revealed  to  us  by  their  words  or  acts. 
I  can  therefore  only  appeal  to  a  reader  who  is  doubtful 
on  this  point  to  look  into  his  own  consciousness,  and 
ask  himself  whether  he  does  not  as  confidently  pro- 

1  It  will  still  be  possible  from  this  point  of  view  that  some  acts 
may  have  a  value  in  themselves  and  so  be  part  of  the  good. 

^  There  are,  as  will  be  seen  below,  some  thinkers  who  do  not 
conceive  of  the  relation  between  "right"  and  "good"  in  this 
way :  a  few  of  them  would  say  that  nothing  can  properly  be  called 
good  but  a  good  act.  Kant,  however,  did  not  hold  this  view, 
though  it  is  frequently  attributed  to  him. 


THE  GOOD  AND  THE  PLEASANT  15 

nounce  (say)  such  and  such  an  act  of  benevolence  to 
be  right,  or  such  and  such  an  act  of  cruelty  to  be  •wTong, 
as  he  pronounces  that  nothing  can  happen  ^nthout  a 
cause  or  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  quantity,  that 
two  and  two  make  four  or  that  two  straight  lines 
cannot  enclose  a  space.  We  are  not  now  concerned 
with  the  question  how  or  on  what  grounds  we  know 
which  particular  acts  are  right  or  which  particular  acts 
we  judge  to  be  right ;  the  only  question  is  a\  hether  we 
do  not  pronounce,  whether  we  cannot  help  thinking, 
some  acts  to  be  right,  and  attach  a  meaning  to  the 
judgement.  If  we  do,  we  have  the  only  proof  that  can 
be  given  either  of  the  existence  of  the  concept  or  of  its 
validity.  We  can  no  more  'prove  the  existence  of  the 
validity  of  the  idea  of  Duty  to  anyone  who  denies  it 
than  we  can  prove  the  existence  of  quantity  to  anyone 
who  declares  that  the  ^\■ord  is  to  him  a  word  without 
meaning  or  the  name  merely  of  a  delusion  which  most 
people  entertain.  The  most  that  can  be  done  is  to 
examine  some  of  the  attempts  which  have  been  made 
to  explain  away  this  ultimate  conception.  Some  of 
these  attempts  will  "be  best  dealt  with  in  the  next  chapter 
upon  the  Moral  Consciousness  :  in  the  present  chapter 
I  shall  confine  myself  to  the  attempts  which  have  been 
made  to  identify  the  conception  of  the  good  with  that 
of  the  pleasant. 

From  the  earliest  dawn  of  serious  reflection  there 
have  been  persons  who  have  maintained  that  pleasure 
is  the  only  good.  That  was  the  position  of  the  very 
early  Cyrenaic  philosophers  and  of  the  later  Epicureans, 
of  Hobbes  m  the  seventeenth  century,  of  Bentham  and 
his  followers  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth.  This 
position  is  usually  called  Hedonism  or  (since  the  rise  of 
the  Benthamite  school)  Utilitarianism.  It  is  important 
to  notice  that  not  every  kind  of  Utilitarianism  denies 
the  validity  and  the  distinctive  meaning  of  the  idea  of 


16  ETHICS 

Duty.  It  may  be  held  that  there  is  a  real  meaning  in 
the  term  "  duty,"  but  that  we  find  out  what  our  duty 
is  by  asking  which  acts  will  produce  most  pleasure — 
it  may  be  our  own  pleasure  (egoistic  Hedonism)  or  it 
may  be  that  of  Society  in  general  (Universahstic 
Hedonism).  Indeed,  anyone  who  attaches  any  real 
meaning  to  the  doctrine  "  pleasure  is  good "  really 
implies  that  the  term  "  good  "  does  mean  something 
besides  "  pleasant,"  though  in  point  of  fact  nothing  is 
ultimately  ^  good  but  pleasure  :  otherwise  his  statement 
would  be  a  mere  tautology :  he  would  be  saying  merely 
"pleasure  is  pleasant."  For  the  moment  we  are  con- 
cerned merely  with  the  view  which  absolutely  identifies 
the  good  and  the  pleasant,  which  treats  good  and  pleasant 
as  simply  two  alternative  names  for  the  same  idea. 

The  attempt  is  frequently  made  to  support  this  view 
by  a  particular  psychological  theory  that  we  do  and 
can  desire  nothing  but  pleasure.  That  doctrine  was 
maintained  by  Bentham  and  (with  less  consistency)  by 
his  disciple  John  Stuart  Slill.  In  the  popular  mind 
Bentham's  name  is  generally  associated  with  the  famous 
phrase  "  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number." 
It  is  less  generally  known  that  Bentham  held  it  to  be 
a  psychological  impossibility  for  anyone  to  desire  the 
greatest  happiness  of  the  greatest  number  except  as  a 
means  to  his  o%\ti  happiness,  happiness  being  assumed 
to  be  sjTionymous  with  pleasure.  One's  o^m  maximum 
pleasure  is  the  only  possible  object  of  human  desire, 
and  consequently  the  only  possible  aim  of  human 
action.  When  Bentham  declared  that  the  proper  aim 
of  human  conduct  was  the  greatest  happiness  of  the 
greatest  number,  he  merely  meant  that  this  was  the 
rule  which  the  majority  (in  its  own  interest)  tries  to 
force  upon  the  individual  :   the  individual  will  only  act 

1  i.e.  good  otherwise  than  as  a  means  to  pleasure  which  alone  is 
good  in  and  for  itself. 


THE  GOOD  AND  THE  PLEASANT  17 

upon  this  principle  in  so  far  as  his  own  personal  tastes 
or  the  "sanctions"  of  law,  public  opinion,  or  Religion 
turn  what  conduces  to  the  general  pleasure  into  the 
pleasantest  (or  apparently  pleasantest)  course  for  him- 
self. Bentham  was  himself  a  devoted  and  laborious 
philanthropist  :  his  explanation  of  his  oa\ii  conduct  was 
simply  that  he  happened  to  be  so  constituted  as  to  find 
as  much  amusement  in  writing  books  on  law  reform  as 
other  men  foimd  in  hunting  or  shooting.  It  is  clear 
that,  if  Bentham  is  right,  right  conduct  can  only  mean 
either  conduct  wliich  conduces  to  my  pleasure  or  conduct 
which,  because  it  conduces  to  their  pleasure,  the  majority 
have  agreed  to  call  right,  and  to  impose  (so  far  as  they 
can)  upon  me  and  upon  other  individuals.  What  are 
the  grounds  of  this  theory  ? 

The  theory,  be  it  remembered,  is  a  purely  psycho- 
logical theory.  We  are  not  now  concerned  with  the 
question  whether  anything  besides  pleasure  is  the  right 
or  proper  object  of  human  desire,  but  simply  A\hethcr, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  any  persons  ever  do  desire  something 
else.  And  here  it  is  clear  that  the  question  can  only 
be  settled  for  each  man  by  looking  into  his  own  con- 
sciousness and  asking  whether  he  does  ahvays  desire 
nothing  but  pleasure,  and  whether,  if  we  look  round 
upon  the  conduct  of  humanity  in  general,  we  can 
explain  that  conduct  upon  the  supposition  that  all 
the  heroisms  and  martyrdoms  recorded  by  history,  and 
all  the  commonplace  self-sacrifice  of  soldiers  and  of 
mothers,  were  really  inspired  by  nothing  but  a  desire 
for  some  pleasure,  or  (as  the  consistent  form  of  the 
theory  holds)  for  maximum  pleasure.  It  will  be  im- 
possible here  to  examine  all  the  fallacies  and  sophistica- 
tions which  account  for  the  prevalence  of  this  theory. 
It  must  suffice  to  point  out  the  mistake  which  has 
probably  played  the  largest  part  in  making  the  theory 
seem    plausible.       The    fallacy    has    been    called    the 


18  ETHICS 

"  hysteron-proteron  "  ^  of  the  hedonistic  Psychology  : 
it  puts  the  cart  before  the  horse.     The  element  of  truth 
which  the  theory  distorts  is  the  undoubted  fact  that 
the  satisfaction  of  any  desire  whatever  necessarily  gives 
pleasure,  and  that,  in  looking  forward  to  the  satisfaction 
of  a  desire,  we  do  necessarily  think  of  the  satisfaction 
as  pleasant ;   but  in  the  case  of  "  disinterested  "  desires, 
the  pleasure  is  dependent  upon  the  previous  existence 
of  a  desire.     If  the  good  Samaritan  cared  about  the 
present  feelings  or  the  future  A^elfare  of  the  man  fallen 
among  thieves,  it  would  no  doubt  give  him  some  pleasure 
to  satisfy  that  desire  for  his  welfare  ;   if  he  had  desired 
his  good  as  Uttle  as  the  priest  and  the  Levite,  there 
would  have  been  nothing  to  suggest  the  strange  idea 
that  to  relieve  him,  to  bind  up  his  nasty  wounds,  and 
to  spend  money  upon  him,  would  be  a  source  of  more 
pleasure  to  himself  than  to  pass  by  on  the  other  side 
and  spend  the  money  upon  himself.     In  the  case  of  the 
great  majority  of  our  pleasures,   it  will  probably  be 
found  that  the  desire  is  the  condition  of  the  pleasure, 
not  the  pleasure  of  the  desire.     That  is  not  the  case 
with  all  desires  :   pleasure  is  one  of  the  things  which  we 
may  desire,  but  most  pleasures  spring  from  the  satis- 
faction of  a  desire  for  something  else  than  the  pleasure. 
Put  a  toothsome  morsel  upon  the  palate  of  the  extremest 
ascetic  :     he   wiU   necessarily   experience   pleasure,    no 
matter  how  httle  he  may  have  desired  that  morsel. 
Make  incisions  in  his  flesh,  and  he  MiU  necessarily  ex- 
perience pain.     On  the  other  hand.  Benevolence  is  a 
source  of  pleasure  only  to  the  benevolent  man — to  the 
man  who  has  previously  desired  his  neighbour's  good. 
To  the  man  who  has  no  such  desire,  or  who  may  even 
desire  other  men's  pains,  such  conduct  would  bring  no 
pleasure  at  all.     The  existence  of  disinterested  male- 

1  From  the  term  used   in  "grammar   to   indicate  the   usage   of 
putting  what  logically  comes  first  last,  e.g.  the  cart  before  the  horse. 


THE    GOOD    AND    THE    PLEASANT     19 

volence  is  as  well  established  a  psychological  fact  as  the  li 
existence  of  disinterested  benevolence.  'I 

It  is  important  to  remember  that  "  disinterested  " 
desires  are  not  necessarily  good  desires ;  the  great 
majority  of  our  desires,  good,  bad,  and  indifferent,  are 
"  disinterested  "  in  this  technical  sense,  i.e.  they  are 
desires  of  objects  for  their  own  sake,  and  not  merely 
as  means  to  the  pleasure  which  will  undoubtedly  accom- 
pany their  satisfaction.  It  is  the  great  merit  of  Bishop 
Butler  to  have  pointed  out  (as  against  Hobbes)  this 
important  psychological  fact ;  until  his  time  it  used 
commonly  to  be  assumed  {e.g.  by  Aristotle)  that 
altruistic  or  other  more  or  less  exalted  desires  were 
the  only  exceptions  to  the  law  that  each  man  pursues 
his  own  maximum  pleasure.  Bishop  Butler  for  the 
first  time  pointed  out  that  by  far  the  greater  number 
of  our  pleasures  spring  from  the  satisfaction  of  desires 
which  are  not  desires  for  pleasure.  All  the  strongest 
human  passions — love,  hate,  anger,  revenge,  ambition — 
are  quite  inexplicable  on  the  assumption  that  men 
naturally  desire  nothing  but  pleasure.  If  the  hedonistic 
Psychology  fails  to  explain  the  highest  achievements  of 
human  nature,  it  is  equally  true  that  the  greatest 
crimes  and  atrocities  would  be  unintelligible  if  man 
were  habitually  guided,  as  the  hedonistic  Psychology 
assumes  him  to  be  guided,  by  an  enlightened  regard  for 
his  greatest  pleasure  on  the  Mhole. 

Sometimes  the  attempt  is  made  to  show  that  in  some 
mysterious  way  Altniism  has  been  evolved  out  of 
Egoism.  Primitive  man,  it  is  suggested,  was  purely 
egoistic,  but  by  some  i:)rocess  of  association  or  the  hke, 
he  has  now  come  to  be  altruistic.  It  will  be  impos- 
sible to  examine  all  the  confusions  and  fallacies  which 
underHe  this  attempt  in  such  writers  as  J.  S.  Mill.  I 
will  only  point  out  :  (1)  that  the  attempt,  even  if  suc- 
cessful, would  not  alter  the  fact  that  mankind  is  not 


20  ETHICS 

wholly  egoistic  now,  whatever  he  may  once  have  been  ; 
(2)  that  the  hedonistic  Psychology  is  even  more  hope- 
lessly at  variance  with  psychological  facts  when  appUed 
to  primitive  man,  to  the  lower  animals,  or  to  the  human 
infant,  than  it  is  as  an  explanation  of  conduct  in  civi- 
lized adults.  If  the  hedonistic  Psychology  were  true, 
everyone  must  have  been  starved  in  early  infancy.  A 
young  animal  could  not  survive  without  sucking,  and 
it  would  never,  on  this  theory,  have  begun  to  suck  until 
it  had  some  reason  to  suppose  that  sucking  would  be  a 
source  of  pleasure.  Such  knowledge  it  could  only 
obtain  from  experience,  and  such  experience  it  could 
not  possibly  possess  a  few  hours  after  birth.  A  young 
animal  sucks  because  it  has  an  impulse  ^  to  suck  :  no 
doubt  when  it  is  found  that  sucking  in  the  right  place 
is  pleasant,  the  impulse  is  strengthened  ;  just  as  it 
would  be  AA'eakened,  at  least  when  intelhgence  has 
reached  a  certain  development,  had  it  been  found  to  be 
painful.  Animals,  infants,  and  to  a  considerable  extent 
primitive  men,  are  governed  by  instincts,  though  in  the 
case  of  man  the  instincts  are  modified  by  the  gradual 
development  of  intelligence  ;  and  instinctive  action  is 
as  Httle  egoistic  as  it  is  altruistic.  The  actions  of  the 
lower  animals,  and  to  a  large  extent  of  primitive  man, 
are  chiefly  governed  by  such  appetites  as  hunger  and 
thirst  and  the  sexual  impulse,  by  the  spontaneous 
impulses  to  walk,  or  run,  or  fly,  and  at  a  higher  stage 
of  development,  to  play  :  by  the  instincts  of  imitation, 
self-display,  or  revenge  ;  by  social  instincts,  of  which  the 
most  powerful  and  primitive  is  the  maternal  instinct ;  by 
the  gregarious  instinct  and  the  love  of  kind ;  by  resent- 
ment or  the  blind  impulse  to  revenge  an  injury.  Physio- 
logically speaking,  some  of  these  instincts  are  directed 
primarily  to  self-preservation,  others  to  the  preservation 
of  the  species  ;  but  the  animal  itself  is  not  aware  of  the 
^  Some  modern  psychologists  would  say  a  "  conative  disposition." 


THE  GOOD  AND  THE  PLEASANT  21 

tendency.  With  growing  intelligence  instincts  pass 
into  desires,  in  which  there  is  a  continuously  increasing 
awareness  of  the  object  aimed  at  and  of  the  further 
consequences  of  its  attamment.  The  more  self -regard- 
ing instincts  are  more  and  more  controlled  by  a  grow  ing 
desire  of  the  man's  well-bemg  as  a  whole,  while  the  social 
instincts  pass  into  devotion  to  family,  tribe,  country, 
and,  ultimately,  to  the  welfare  of  humanity  at  large. 
But  neither  the  extremest  egoism  nor  the  loftiest  altruism 
extinguishes  a  host  of  other  particular  desires,  in  the 
gratification  of  w  hich  most  of  our  pleasures  have  to  be 
sought,  though  in  the  more  developed  mind  these 
desires  may  be  more  or  less  completely  subordinated 
to  the  domuiating  desire  of  promoting  the  good  on  the 
whole — it  may  be  of  self,  it  may  be  of  others. 

The  defenders  of  Hedonism  have  often  based  their 
theory  upon  the  supposed  psychological  truth  that  every 
desire  is  a  desire  of  pleasure  ;  but  it  is  just  the  more 
serious  attention  to  Psychology — particularly  the  Psy- 
chology of  the  lower  animals  and  of  primitive  man — 
that  has  led  to  the  practical  disappearance  of  the  doc- 
trine known  as  the  hedonistic  Psychology  from  the 
pages  even  of  the  most  natm-ahstically  minded  moraHsts. 

But  it  must  not  be  supposed  that  to  get  rid  of  the 
hedonistic  Psychology  necessarily  disposes  of  Hedonism. 
It  is  clear  that,  so  long  as  we  accept  that  Psychology, 
we  are  necessarily  committed  to  Hedonism  in  Ethics. 
If  we  can  desire  nothing  but  our  own  pleasure,  it  is 
clearly  senseless  to  maintain  that  we  ought  to  desire 
something  else.  But  if  it  is  admitted  that  we  can  and 
sometimes  do  desire  other  things  besides  pleasure — 
knowledge,  aesthetic  gratification,  other  people's  well- 
being,  our  own  virtue ;  if  moreover  it  be  admitted  that 
even  when  we  desire  pleasure,  we  desire  one  pleasure 
more  than  another  without  its  being  necessarily  greater 
in  amount,  then  it  becomes  perfectly  possible  to  main- 


22  ETHICS 

tain  that  any  one  or  all  of  these  desired  objects  are  good. 
On  the  other  hand,  we  may  still,  if  we  like,  maintain 
that  only  pleasure  is  reaUy  good  ;  only  in  that  case  we 
must  not  pretend  that  our  doctrine  is  in  any  way  de- 
rived from  or  based  upon  experience.  We  are  really 
pronouncing  an  a  priori  moral  judgement  when  we  say 
that  pleasure  alone  is  good,  as  much  as  when  we  say 
that  virtue  and  knowledge  are  good.  And  the  very 
fact  that  we  do  so  judge  involves  the  admission  that 
we  attach  a  meaning  to  the  term  good  which  is  not  the 
same  as  that  of  pleasure.  Experience  can  tell  us  what 
is  pleasant  :  it  cannot  tell  us  whether  what  is  pleasant 
is  reasonably  or  rightly  to  be  desired,  and  that  is  what 
we  mean  when  we  say. that  "pleasure  is  desirable  or 
good."  If  we  do  make  that  judgement,  and  mean  by 
it  something  more  than  that  pleasure  is  pleasant,  we 
are  pronouncing  a  judgement  which  does  not  rest  upon 
experience  in  the  ordinary  sense  of  the  word,  and  so  may 
be  called  an  a  priori  judgement,  or  (if  anyone  dislikes 
the  associations  of  that  term)  an  immediate  judgement. 
The  judgement  "  pleasure  alone  is  good  "  is  just  as  much 
a  priori  or  immediate  as  the  judgement  "  virtue  is  good." 

There  is  another  way  of  evading  the  admission  that 
there  is  in  the  human  mind  a  distinctive  notion  of 
"  good  "  which  cannot  be  anatysed  away  into  anjrthing 
else.  By  many  writers  of  the  present  day  "  the  good  " 
is  identified  with  the  satisfactory.  It  is  admitted  that 
our  desires  are  not  all  desires  for  pleasure,  and  that  we 
do  not  always  prefer  the  most  pleasant  satisfactions  to 
the  less  pleasant.  Some  things  satisfy  more  permanent, 
more  deep-seated,  more  fundamental  desires  and  aspira- 
tions than  others.  When  a  high-minded  man  prefers 
the  satisfaction  of  some  altruistic  or  more  ideal  desire 
in  preference  to  some  fleeting  passion  or  to  the  desire 


THE    GOOD    AND    THE    PLEASANT     23 

for  ease  and  comfort,  it  is  because  he  finds  it  in  the  long 
run  more  "  satisfactory  "  to  do  so.  All  satisfaction  is 
good,  but  some  satisfactions  satisfy  more  than  others. 
Some  Idealists  appear  to  adopt  this  view,  but  it  is  par- 
ticularly characteristic  of  the  Pragmatists.  The  Philo- 
sophy known  as  Pragmatism  often  strikes  the  super- 
ficial reader  as  a  particularly  edifying  and  ethical 
Philosophy,  since  it  tends  to  resolve  the  idea  of  truth 
into  that  of  goodness.  The  only  meaning  of  saying 
that  some  statement  is  true  is  that  we  can  secure 
some  good  by  acting  upon  it.  It  is  not  noticed  that, 
if  the  notion  of  objective  truth — a  truth  that  does  not 
mean  simply  what  you  or  I  find  it  convenient  to  assume — 
is  treated  as  a  delusion,  there  can  be  as  little  room  for 
truth  in  Ethics  as  in  Logic  ;  the  statement  "  virtue  is 
good  "  is  as  little  true  as  any  other  statement :  and  it  is 
hardly  realized  that  after  all  the  good  means  for  such 
philosophers  nothing  more  than  that  which  chances  to 
satisfy  my  desire — any  and  every  desire  of  mine.  I 
cannot  but  feel  that  the  identification  of  the  good  vath. 
the  satisfactory — even  in  the  mouths  of  professedly 
Idealistic  thinkers — really  means  one  of  two  things. 
Either  it  is  a  better-sounding  name  for  the  pleasant : 
or,  when  we  are  told  that  one  satisfaction  is  a  satis- 
faction of  the  "  deeper,"  "  more  permanent  "  or  "  more 
universal  "  self,  or  the  like,  such  expressions  are  mere 
disguises  for  that  fundamental  and  unanalysable  dis- 
tmction  between  "  higher  "  and  "  lower,"  "  better  " 
and  "  worse,"  which  is  ostensibly  denied.  The  self 
which  is  really  made  into  the  supreme  judge  is  simply 
the  rational  self  :  the  satisfaction  which  is  pronounced 
the  most  "  satisfactory  "  is  the  satisfaction  of  this 
rational  self — in  other  words,  of  the  Moral  Consciousness. 
Let  us  examine  the  language  used  by  the  late  Prof. 
William  James  in  speaking  of  the  moral  life.     He  teUs 


24  ETHICS 

us  explicitly  that  "  the  essence  of  good  is  to  satisfy 
demand."  1  And  yet  he  admits  that  for  the  ethical 
philosopher — and  presumably  for  non-philosophers  who 
have  some  desire  to  rationalize  their  conduct — "  the 
guiding  principle  for  ethical  philosophy  (since  all  de- 
mands conjointly  cannot  be  satisfied  in  this  poor  world)  " 
must  be  "  simply  to  satisfy  as  many  demands  as  we 
can.''''  "  That  act  must  be  the  best  act,  accordingly, 
which  makes  for  the  best  whole,  in  the  sense  of  awakening 
the  least  sense  of  dissatisfaction."  -  Now  this  seems  to 
me  distinctly  to  imply  that  it  did  appear  to  Prof.  James, 
as  to  others,  that  there  was  something  self -evidently 
rational  in  producing  a  greater  amount  of  good  rather 
than  a  lesser  one,  no  matter  whose  good  it  is.  And  this 
indifEerence  as  to  whether  the  good  is  my  good  or  some- 
body else's  impHes  that  I  am  looking  upon  the  matter 
objectively — from  the  point  of  view  of  disinterested 
reason  rather  than  that  of  personal  desire.  I  may  still, 
no  doubt,  be  seeking  to  satisfy  myself,  but  that  in  myself 
which  I  am  seeking  to  satisfy  is  simply  a  demand  for 
rationality  in  conduct.  We  may  doubt  whether  James 
did,  as  he  seems  to  think,  really  regard  all  "  demands  " 
as  on  a  level — in  other  words,  treat  all  satisfactions  as 
equally  good,  but  it  is  at  least  clear  that  he  had  at  the 
bottom  of  his  mind  just  that  same  notion  of  good,  as 
something  which  objectively  ought  to  be,  which  lies  at 
the  basis  of  such  ethical  systems  as  Kant's.  No  doubt 
I  shall  not  act  upon  this  "  instinct  of  rationahty  "  except 
in  proportion  as  I  desire  to  be  rational,  but  I  could  not 
be  influenced  by  an  instinct  of  rationality  unless  my 
Reason  were  capable  of  recognizing  that  a  "good"  or 
"  rational  "  end  means  something  more  than  "  that  which 
you  or  I  happen  to  desire. ' '  If  I  recognize  that  something 
which  another  desires  is  good  though  I  do  not  desire  it 
1  The  Will  to  Believe,  p.  201.  ^  yj;^^^  p_  205. 


THE  GOOD  AND  THE  PLEASANT  25 

myself,  that  implies  that  to  pronounce  something  good  is 
something  other  than  to  say  'I  desire  it."  If  all  that 
"  good  "  meant  were  that  somebody  else  desires  it,  there 
would  be  no  reason  whatever  for  my  so  acting  as  to  secure 
a  maximum  satisfaction  of  other  men's  desires.  If  I  do 
recognize  that  that  which  is  much  desired  ought  to  be, 
that  is  to  say  something  much  more  and  quite  different 
from  simply  "  it  is  much  desired."  It  is  true  that  I  shall 
not  act  on  this  principle  unless  it  satisfies  some  "  de- 
mand "  in  myself,  but  the  demand  is  simplj^  the  demand 
that  what  ought  to  be  shall  be.  I  shall  not  be  influenced 
by  that  demand  unless  I  desire  to  bring  the  good  into 
existence,  but  the  very  fact  that  I  am  capable  of  feeling 
such  a  desire  shows  that  in  calling  a  thing  good  I  do 
not  mean  simply  that  I  or  anybody  else  desires  it. 

I  ^vill  notice  one  last  attempt  to  reconcile  the  obvious 
facts  of  the  moral  life  with  the  non-recognition  of  any 
distinctive  concept  of  good  or  right.  It  is  sometimes 
contended  that,  though  pleasure  is  the  only  thing  that 
can  or  ought  to  be  desired,  some  pleasures  are  higher 
than  other  pleasures.  This  position  may  be  illustrated 
by  the  well-known  passage  in  J.  S.  IVIill's  Utilitarianism  : 

'■  It  will  be  absurd  that  while,  in  estimating  all  other 
things,  quality  is  considered  as  well  as  quantity,  the 
estimation  of  pleasures  should  be  supposed  to  depend 
on  quantity  alone. 

"  If  I  am  asked  what  I  mean  by  difference  of  quality 
in  pleasures,  or  what  makes  one  pleasure  more  valuable 
than  another,  merely  as  a  j^leasure,  except  its  being 
greater  in  amount,  there  is  but  one  possible  answer. 
Of  two  pleasures,  if  there  be  one  to  which  all,  or  almost 
all,  who  have  experience  of  both  give  a  decided  prefer- 
ence, irrespective  of  any  feeling  of  moral  obhgation  to 
prefer  it,  that  is  the  more  desirable  pleasure.  .  .  . 


26  ETHICS 

"  Now  it  is  an  unquestionable  fact  that  those  who  are 
equally  acquainted  with,  and  equally  capable  of,  appre- 
ciating and  enjoying  both,  do  give  a  most  marked 
preference  to  the  manner  of  existence  which  employs 
their  higher  faculties.  Few  human  creatures  would 
consent  to  be  changed  into  anj^  of  the  lo^^er  animals, 
for  a  promise  of  the  fullest  allowance  of  a  beast's 
pleasures ;  no  intelligent  human  being  would  consent 
to  be  a  fool,  no  person  of  feeling  and  conscience  would 
be  selfish  and  base,  even  though  they  should  be  per- 
suaded that  the  fool,  the  dunce,  or  the  rascal  is  better 
satisfied  Avdth  his  lot  than  they  are  with  theirs.  They 
would  not  resign  what  they  possess  more  than  he,  for 
the  most  complete  satisfaction  of  all  the  desires  which 
they  have  in  common  with  him.  ...  It  is  better  to  be 
a  human  being  dissatisfied  than  a  pig  satisfied  ;  better 
to  be  Socrates  dissatisfied  than  a  fool  satisfied.  And  if 
the  fool,  or  the  pig,  is  of  a  difierent  opinion,  it  is  because 
they  only  know  one  side  of  the  question."  ^ 

It  may  easily  be  shown  that  these  admissions  really 
give  up  the  hedonistic  Psychology  altogether.  If  all 
we  care  about  is  pleasure,  it  cannot  matter  to  us  of 
what  sort  that  pleasure  is,  provided  we  have  enough 
of  it.  The  hedonistic  doctrine  is  precisely  that  in  esti- 
mating the  value  of  difierent  states  of  consciousness  we 
attach,  or  reasonably  ought  to  attach,  importance  to 
nothing  but  their  pleasantness.  When  we  make  abstrac- 
tion of  every  characteristic  of  the  pleasant  consciousness 
except  its  pleasantness,  there  is  nothing  left  which  could 
possibly  induce  us  to  prefer  the  pleasantness  of  one 
state  to  the  pleasantness  of  another  except  its  being 
greater  in  amount,  i.e.  in  intensity,  or  duration,  or  in 
both  respects  taken  together.  One  abstract  pleasant- 
ness   can    differ    from   another    only    in    bemg    more 

^    Utilitarianism,  pp.  11-14. 


THE    GOOD    AND    THE    PLEASANT     27 

pleasant.  If  a  man  does  care  of  what  sort  his  pleasure 
is,  if  he  thinks  it  better  to  enjoy  mtellectual  or  bene- 
volent pleasures  rather  than  sensual  or  selfish  ones,  he 
does  not  care  about  pleasure  only  ;  he  cares  about 
something  else  in  the  pleasant  state  besides  its  pleasant- 
ness. If  he  prefers  a  higher  pleasure  to  a  lower  Avhich 
is  greater  in  amount,  he  is  caring  about  the  height  of 
the  pleasure,  not  about  the  pleasantness  of  it  merely. 
To  hold  that  soyne  pleasure  is  the  good  is  not  to  be  a 
Hedonist.  And  a  man  who  judges  that  some  pleasures 
are  better  than  other  equally  or  more  pleasant  plea- 
sures clearly  does  not  identify  the  good  and  the  pleasant. 
He  impHes  that  the  good  means  to  him  something  more 
than  the  pleasant.  He  implies  that,  though  pleasure 
may  be  an  element  in  every  state  of  consciousness  which 
is  ultimately  good,  the  goodness  of  that  state  is  not  to 
be  measured  merely  by  that  pleasantness.  Mill's  words 
supply  an  excellent  description  of  the  actual  moral 
consciousness  of  a  high-minded  man,  but  they  are  fatal 
to  the  dogma  which  as  a  Hedonist  he  professed  to 
accept. 

We  cannot  therefore  reconcile  Hedonism  with  the 
moral  standard  which  Mill  practically  recognizes  by 
adopting  his  distinction  between  higher  and  lower  plea- 
sure. Even  to  admit  higher  pleasures  is  to  admit  that 
there  is  something  in  the  good  besides  pleasure.  What 
precisely  that  something  is  we  shall  have  to  consider 
more  fully  in  our  chapter  on  the  moral  criterion.  I 
will  only  say  here,  by  way  of  anticipation,  that  most  of 
those  who  deny  that  pleasure  is  the  only  good  would  give 
the  highest  place  among  goods  to  Morahty  or  \artue  or 
the  good%vill  or  character  (these  are  only  so  many  different 
ways  of  expressing  the  same  thing).  They  regard  the 
individual  good  act  or  the  good  character — that  is,  the 
bent  of  the  will  which  that  act  reveals — as  in  itself  a 


28  ETHICS 

good,  as  an  end  in  itself,  as  intrinsically  worth  having. 
Some  of  them  would  even  go  so  far  as  to  say  that 
nothing  but  virtue  is  the  good,  but  these  would  find  it 
difficult  to  say  why  (if  that  be  so)  it  is  generally  con- 
sidered a  duty  to  promote  other  people's  happiness  as 
well  as  to   make   them  better.      Most  anti -hedonistic 
morahsts  would  admit  that  pleasure  is  good.     Some 
would  add  knowledge  and  the  appreciation  of  Beauty, 
the  cultivation  of  the  intellectual  and  aesthetic  side  of 
our  nature,  and  perhaps  many  other  things.     There  is, 
as  has  already  been  pointed  out,  no  way  of  proving 
conclusively  which  of  these  views  is  right.     The  reader 
can  only  be  invited  to  analyse  his  oa^ti  actual  moral 
judgements,  and  ask  what  view  they  imply  as  to  the 
real  nature  of  the  good.     A  further  consideration  of 
this  question  had  best  be  postponed  till  we  deal  with 
the  problem  which  we  have  not  yet  finally  discussed— 
the  question.  "  Granted  that  I  ought  to  do  my  duty, 
how  am  I  to  know  in  what  particular  acts  that  duty 
consists  ?  "     But  before  leaving  the  question  of  Hedo- 
nism, I  should  like  to  point  out  an  element  of  truth  in 
that  doctrine  to  which  it  owes  much  of  the  plausibihty 
it  possesses  for  many  minds.     Hedonism  recognizes  the 
undoubted  fact  that  nothing  can  be  supposed  to  possess 
ultimate  value  except  some  kind  of  consciousness.     For 
a  world  of  mere  machines  there  could  be  no  such  thing 
as  good  or  evil,  worth  or  unworth.     We  could  imagine 
a  world  which  would  look  to  an  outside  spectator  exactly 
like  our  world,  but  in  which  there  was  no  consciousness 
at  all.     The  men  and  women  in  it  might  behave  much 
as  they  do  now  ;  their  bodily  movements  might  corres- 
pond or  faO  to  correspond  to  certain  rules.     Such  auto- 
matic men  might  eat  and  drink  immoderately  or  mode- 
rately, kill  each  other  or  keep  each  other  aUve,  sweat 
each  other  or  pay  them  good  wages,  keep  their  money 


THE  GOOD  AND  THE  PLEASANT  29 

in  their  pockets  or  build  hospitals,  stay  at  home  or  go 
to  church.  All  the  external  machinery  of  social  life,  of 
charity,  or  of  religion  might  be  theirs.  But  in  such  a 
world  there  would  be  nothing  good  or  valuable,  nothing 
bad  or  un valuable ;  and  in  such  a  world,  consequently, 
there  would  be  no  right  or  wTong  acts,  no  IMorahty. 
Acts  can  only  be  called  right  or  wrong  in  so  far  as  they 
represent  some  state  of  a  conscious  agent  which  has 
value  in  itself,  or  in  so  far  as  they  lead  to  some  conscious 
state  in  the  agent  himself  or  in  another  being.  This 
has  hardly  ever  been  seriously  denied,  but  it  is  some- 
times forgotten  when  people  talk  about  MoraUty  as 
though  it  meant  the  mere  external  conformity  to  a  rule, 
whether  that  rule  is  thought  of  as  an  abstract  moral 
law  or  as  the  will  of  God.^  Hedonists  sometimes  criti- 
cize the  position  that  virtue  is  good  as  though  it  involved 
some  such  notion,  but  no  beUever  in  the  intrinsic  good- 
ness of  virtue  would  for  a  moment  admit  that  this  was 
so.  It  is  not  an  abstract  conformity  of  his  acts  with  a 
law  that  he  pronounces  valuable,  but  the  \irtuous  state 
of  consciousness — the  conscious  direction  of  his  will  to 
an  end.  The  question  at  issue  between  Hedonists  and 
their  opponents  is  "What  in  consciousness  is  intrinsi- 
cally valuable  :  is  it  merely  its  pleasantness  or  is  it  also 
a  certain  state  of  the  will  and  a  certain  state  of  intel- 
lect ?  "  There  are  three  sides  or  aspects  of  all  conscious- 
ness— intellection,  volition  or  conation,  feeling.  Tho 
Hedonist  isolates  the  feehng  aspect  of  consciousness 
from  all  the  rest,  and  pronounces  that  m  feeling  nothing 
is  valuable  but  its  pleasantness.  The  question  is  whether 
these  other  aspects  of  consciousness  must  not  also  be 
taken  into  consideration  in  determining  the  absolute 
and  the  relative  value  of  different  states  of  conscious 

1  Unless,  indeed,  it  were  held  that  the  acts  produced  some  effect 
upon  the  Divine  Consciousness. 


30  ETHICS 

being — whether  the  rightly  directed  state  of  will  may 
not  have  a  value  as  well  as  pleasant  feeling,  knowledge 
as  well  as  the  pleasure  which  usually  accompanies  know- 
ledge. If  we  were  to  conclude  that  this  is  so,  we 
should  not  in  any  way  be  gi\'ing  up  the  position  that 
nothing  but  consciousness  can  be  valuable  in  and  for 
itself. 

I  have  tried  in  this  chapter  to  show  that  there  is  no 
satisfactory  method  of  explaining  away  this  ultimate 
fact  of  consciousness  that  we  do  pronounce  moral  judge- 
ments— judgements  of  a  distinctive  kind  which  caimot  be 
analysed  or  resolved  into  any  other  kind  of  judgement 
or  any  other  kind  of  conscious  experience — into  judge- 
ments about  the  pleasantness  of  our  conscious  states 
(which  is  of  course  a  mere  matter  of  sensibility)  or  into 
mere  desires  which  may  happen  to  be  stronger  than 
other  desires.  If  we  do  pronounce  such  judgements, 
that  implies  that  we  have  distinct  categories  or  notions 
both  of  the  good  and  of  the  right.  If  so,  there  must 
be  some  distinctive  faculty  or  capacity  of  our  nature 
which  is  capable  of  pronouncing  such  judgements.  What 
is  the  nature  of  that  capacity  ?  That  will  be  the  sub- 
ject of  our  next  chapter. 


CHAPTER    III 

THE   MORAL   CONSCIOtTSNESS 

In  the  present  chapter  I  propose  to  discuss  the  question 
which  is  sometimes  stated  in  the  form,  "  AMiat  is  the 
moral  faculty  ?  "  The  word  faculty  is  sometimes 
objected  to  for  reasons  which  it  would  take  too  long  to 
point  out  now  :    it  is  associated  with  a  particular  kind 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS         31 

of  obsolete  Psychology  usually  condemned  under  the 
name  of  the  "  faculty  Psychology,"  which  is  supposed 
to  regard  the  different  activities  of  the  human  mind  as 
wholly  separate  organs,  as  distinct  from  one  another  as 
the  different  organs  of  the  body,  or  more  so,  and  to 
forget  the  unity  of  the  self  to  which  all  these  activities 
belong.  Here  the  term  is  used  to  mean  no  more  than 
"  capacity."  If  we  do  pronounce  the  distinctive  moral 
judgements  of  which  I  have  been  speaking,  it  is  clear 
that  we  must  have  a  capacity  of  doing  so  :  for  it  is 
certain  that  we  can  do  nothing  that  we  had  not  pre\d- 
ously  a  capacity  for  doing.  The  only  question  that  can 
be  raised  is  :  ""To  what  part  of  our  nature  does  this 
capacity  belong  ?  Whence  come  these  moral  judgements  ? 
What  sort  of  psychical  facts  at  bottom  are  they  ?  " 
Among  those  who  do  in  some  sense  or  degree  recognize 
the  distinctive  character  of  our  moral  judgements,  con- 
sidered simply  as  psychical  facts,  there  have  been  three 
main  answers  to  the  question  : 

(1)  There  are  those  who  regard  them  as  due  to  a 
particular  kind  of  feeling  or  sensibility — a  moral  sense 
comparable  to  the  five  bodily  senses  or  to  the  sense  of 
beauty.  The  moral  judgement  merely  expresses  the 
fact  that  such  feelings  are  actually  experienced.  Moral 
approbation  and  disapprobation  are  feelings  of  a  par- 
ticular kind,  excited  by  the  contemplation  of  certain 
acts — our  own  or  other  people's. 

(2)  There  are  those  w^ho  regard  moral  judgements  as 
springing  from  the  intellectual  part  of  our  nature  and  who 
speak  of  the  moral  faculty  as  Reason  or  Practical  Reason. 

(3)  There  are  those  who  speak  of  the  moral  faculty 
as  something  wholly  sui  generis — neither  any  kind  of 
feeling  or  emotion  or  any  kind  of  thought  or  intellection, 
and  who  refuse  to  call  the  moral  faculty  anything  but 
Conscience. 


32  ETHICS 

This  last  view  may  be  set  aside  as  being  really  un- 
intelligible. It  has  hardly  been  explicitly  maintained 
by  any  writer  of  importance  except  the  late  Dr. 
Martineau ;  and,  when  his  arguments  are  examined,  it 
Avill  be  found  that  all  that  he  really  means  to  insist  upon 
is  the  fact  that  our  moral  judgements  are  judgements 
of  a  very  distinctive  character — sharply  distinguishable 
from  judgements  about  ordinary  matters  of  fact.  This 
is  no  doubt  true  and  important,  but  it  is  not  denied  by 
those  who  ascribe  such  judgements  to  the  Reason  or  the 
intellectual  part  of  our  nature.  Because  space  and  time 
are  different,  and  spacial  properties  are  apprehended 
by  the  intellect,  it  does  not  follow  that  our  ideas  of  time 
are  derived  from  some  faculty  which  is  not  intellect. 
Practically,  the  choice  Ues  between  the  two  first  views. 
It  must  not,  of  course,  be  supposed  that  either  of  these 
schools  necessarily  deny  the  existence  of  what  is  popu- 
larly called  Conscience.  It  should  be  observed,  how- 
ever, that  in  ordinary  language  Conscience  is  usually 
used  to  indicate  not  merely  the  faculty  of  knowing  what 
we  ought  to  do  but  also  the  whole  complex  of  emotions 
and  impulses  which  impel  us  to  the  doing  of  what  we 
know  to  be  right  or  deter  us  from  the  doing  of  what  we 
know  to  be  wrong.  WTien  we  talk  about  Conscience 
"  remonstrating  "  or  "  rebuking  "  or  "  enjoining  "  or 
"  impelling,"  we  clearly  mean  to  imply  some  kind  of 
emotional  impulse  or  desire  as  well  as  mere  knowledge. 
The  question  before  us  now  is  the  question,  "  By  means 
of  what  faculty  or  activity  or  part  of  my  nature  do  I 
know  what  I  ought  to  do  ? "  Or,  more  strictly,  the 
question  may  be  stated  thus  :  "Is  the  consciousness 
of  right  and  wrong  really  knowledge  at  all  or  is  it  only 
some  kind  of  feeling  or  emotion  ?  " 

The  view  that  moral  judgements  are  essentially  rational 
judgements  was  the  view  of  Plato  and  of  Platonists  in 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS         33 

all  ages — of  the  greatest  Schoolmen,  of  the  old  English 
Rationalists  such  as  Cudworth,  Cumberland,  and  Clarke, 
of  Kant  and  Hegel,  and  almost  all  modern  Idealists.     It 
has  generally  been  the  view  of  those  who  emphasize 
strongly  the  functions  of  Reason  as  distinct  from  sensible 
experience  in  their  general  theory  of  knowledge,  and 
who  emphasize  and  make  much  of  the  idea  of  moral 
obhgation.      Those  philosophers,   on   the  other   hand, 
who  tend  towards  Empiricism  or  Sensationalism — who 
derive   all  knowledge  from  experience  and  for  whom 
experience   practically   means  sensation — have   usually 
been  inclined  to  identify  our   moral  judgements  with 
some  kind  of  feeling  or  emotion.     If  all  knowledge  is 
derived  from  sensation,  it  is  clear  that  the  idea  of  right 
and  wrong  cannot  be  derived  from  any  other  source. 
Sometimes,  as  has  already  been  pointed  out,  the  only 
feeling  supposed  to  bo  capable  of  influencing  human 
action  has  been  held  to  be  pleasure  or  the  desire  of  it. 
From  this  point  of  view  there  can  hardly  be  said  to  be 
a   moral  faculty  or  moral   consciousness  at  aU.     The 
theory  of  a  "  moral  sense  "  quite  distinct  from  ordinary 
feelings  of  pleasure  or  pain  or  from  any  other  emotion 
was  for  the  first  time  put  forward  by  the  third  Lord 
Shaftesbury,     the    famous    author    of    the    Character- 
istics,  and  more  systematical!}'-    by  the   Ulster   philo- 
sopher, Francis  Hutcheson.     These  two  men  are  con- 
sidered  the  founders   of   the    "  Moral   Sense   School " 
(sometimes  spoken  of  as  the   "  sentimental  school  "), 
but  substantially  the  same  view  has  often  been  main- 
tained by  others  who  do  not  actually  use  the  term 
"  Moral  Sense." 

The  importance  of  the  question  is  apt  not  to  be 
appreciated  at  first  sight.  If  we  have  a  faculty  wliich 
can  appreciate  the  difference  between  right  and  wrong, 
it  may  be  suggested  that  it  cannot  matter  what  sort  of 

c 


34  ETHICS 

faculty  it  is.  Whether  you  call  it  Reason  or  Sense 
may  seem  to  be  Uttle  more  than  a  question  of  names. 
"  A  rose  by  any  other  name  would  smeU  as  sweet."  It 
is  not  recognized  that  to  identify  moral  judgements  with 
any  kind  of  feeUng  must  involve  the  total  destruction 
of  their  objective  character.  "  The  term  Sense,"  says 
Sidgwick,  "  suggests  a  capacity  for  feehngs  which  may 
vary  from  A  to  B  without  either  being  in  error,  rather 
than  a  faculty  of  cognition  ;  and  it  appears  to  me 
fundamentally  important  to  avoid  this  suggestion.  I 
have  therefore  thought  it  better  to  use  the  term  Reason 
...  to  denote  the  faculty  of  moral  cognition."  ^  This 
point  may  require  a  Uttle  further  explanation  and 
illustration. 

When  a  colour-blind  man  sees  a  red  rose  and  pro- 
nounces it  to  be  of  the  same  colour  as  the  neighbouring 
grass-plot,  it  really  is  the  same  for  him.  He  is  guilty 
of  no  error  in  his  judgement,  unless  he  mistakenly  infers 
that  it  will  appear  the  same  to  normal-sighted  persons. 
Now,  according  to  the  moral  sense  school,  when  I  pro- 
nounce an  action  wrong,  all  that  is  reaUy  meant  is  that 
it  excites  in  my  mind  an  "  idea  {i.e.  a  feeling)  of  dis- 
approbation." But  it  is  equally  a  fact  that  it  may 
excite  a  feeling  of  approbation  in  another  man's  mind. 
A  vivisectional  experiment,  for  instance,  wiU  excite  the 
Hvehest  feelings  of  approbation  in  the  mind  of  an  ardent 
student  of  Physiology,  while  it  wiU  excite  a  perfect 
storm  of  disapproving  feehng  in  the  mind  of  a  strong 
Anti-vivisectionist.  The  point  is  not  that  there  are  no 
means  of  settling  authoritatively  which  is  right  and 
which  is  wrong.  On  any  view  as  to  the  nature  of  the 
moral  faculty  there  are  undoubtedly  considerable  differ- 
ences of  opinion  about  ethical  questions.  But,  upon  the 
"  moral  sense  "  view,  it  is  perfectly  meaningless  to  ask 

^  Methods  of  Ethics,  p.  34. 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS  35 

the  question — as  meaningless  as  to  ask  which  is  right, 
the  man  who  likes  mustard  or  the  man  who  disHkes  it. 
Mustard  is  not  objectively  nice  or  objectively  nasty  ; 
the  whole  truth  about  the  matter  is  that  it  is  nice  to 
one  person,  nasty  to  another.  Such  judgements,  we  say, 
are  of  merely  "  subjective  "  validity ;  they  represent  the 
pecuHarities  of  certain  minds,  not  truths  which  must  be 
equally  true  for  all  persons  who  are  not  in  error  about 
the  matter.  If  moral  judgements  were  simply  feelings 
or  emotions  of  a  particular  kind,  they  would  be  in 
exactly  the  same  case.  They  would  represent  mere 
indi\idual  likings  or  dislikings.  There  could  be  no  ob- 
jective truth  about  matters  of  right  and  WTong.  And 
this  means  that  what  we  commonly  call  moral  obligation 
would  be  a  mere  delusion.  "  Without  objectivity,"  in 
the  words  of  Edouard  von  Hartmann,  "  there  is  no 
MoraUty."  And  yet  the  very  heart  of  the  moral  con- 
sciousness is  precisely  the  con\action  that  there  is  an 
objective  truth  about  the  moral  problem — that  some 
acts  are  right  and  others  -wrong,  no  matter  whether 
this  or  that  person  thinks  so  or  not.  This  conviction 
involves,  be  it  observed,  no  claim  to  personal  uifalli- 
biUty  on  the  part  of  the  individual  making  the  judge- 
ment. We  may  make  mistakes  about  moral  matters 
as  we  may  make  mistakes  in  doing  a  sum,  or  in  esti- 
mating the  rival  claims  of  two  scientific  theories,  or 
about  the  guilt  or  imiocence  of  an  accused  person.  But 
in  these  last  cases  it  is  universally  admitted  that  there 
is  a  truth  about  the  matter.  When  a  long  multiplica- 
tion sum  is  given  out  to  a  class  of  thirty  small  boys, 
the  answers  will  probably  be  foimd  to  difier.  But  the 
whole  form  will  agree  that  the  diverse  answers  cannot 
all  be  right.  It  never  occurs  to  the  most  sceptical  of 
small  boys  to  say  to  the  Master  :  "No  doubt  the  answer 
is  336  for  you  and  for  the  book,  but  I  assure  you  that 


36  ETHICS 

for  me  these  figures  make  337."  And  nobody  ever 
thinks  of  doubting  the  objective  truth  of  the  multipHca- 
tion-table  because  particular  small  boys  make  mistakes, 
any  more  than  they  maintain  that  the  question  whether 
A  and  B  committed  a  murder  is  merely  a  question  of 
taste  because  juries,  and  even  judges,  occasionally 
convict  innocent  persons.  We  have  a  deep-seated 
conviction  that  it  is  even  so  with  morals,  however  great 
may  be  the  difficulty  of  pronouncing  which  course  of 
action  is  right  in  particular  cases.  It  is  often  indeed 
just  when  we  are  most  in  doubt  what  course  of  action 
is  right,  that  we  are  surest  that  there  is  a  right  course, 
if  only  we  could  find  it  out.  That  is  just  what  we  mean 
by  saying  that  an  action  is  right,  or  that  it  ought  to  be 
done.  We  mean  that  every  right-judging  intelligence 
would  necessarily  judge  it  to  be  right.  We  actually 
think  in  this  way,  and  the  fact  that  we  think  so,  and 
cannot  but  think  so,  is  the  only  reason  we  can  have  for 
believing  anything  whatever  to  be  true — whether  in 
Mathematics,  in  Science,  or  in  morals. 

It  is  therefore  a  matter  of  vital  importance  to  Ethics 
to  maintain  that  the  moral  faculty  is  rational — that  it 
belongs  to  the  intellectual  part  of  our  nature,  and  is 
not  a  mere  matter  of  feeling  or  emotion.  The  "  distinc- 
tiveness "of  a  "  sense  "  or  feeling  can  give  it  no  sort  of 
superiority  to  other  feelings.  The  feeling  of  self-dis- 
approbation may  be  disagreeable,  but  the  feeling  occa- 
sioned by  the  rack  or  the  thumb-screw  may  be  more 
so  :  if  anyone  prefers  to  tell  a  lie  and  put  up  uith  the 
disagreeable  feeling  of  remorse,  it  is  impossible  to  give 
any  reason  why  he  should  not  do  so,  Hume  saw  quite 
clearly  that  on  the  moral  sense  view  Morality  must 
mean  simply  what  other  people  feel  about  my  conduct, 
and  he  was  quite  willing  to  accept  the  consequence : 
"  Actions  are  not  approved  because  they  are  moral : 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS  37 

they  are  moral  because  they  are  approved."  The  only 
objectivity  which  could  possibly  be  claimed  for  a  moral 
rule  would  be  that  it  represents  the  opinion  of  the 
majority,  and  the  fundamental  principle  of  the  resulting 
Ethic  would  be  ''  Always  shout  with  the  largest  crowd  " 
— unless  indeed  you  happen  to  be  so  constituted  as  to 
find  the  pleasure  of  self -approbation  more  satisfactory 
than  that  of  popularity  with  its  attendant  results. 

In  spite  of  Hume's  exhibition  of  its  real  tendency,  the 
moral  sense  view  or  something  like  it  has  occasionally 
been  maintained  in  modern  times  even  by  writers  who 
do  not  really  mean  to  acquiesce  in  its  destructive  con- 
sequences .^  But  of  late  years  the  Moralists  who  reduce 
all  Morality  to  a  mere  matter  of  emotion  are  in  general 
quite  a\vare  of  what  they  are  doing.  And  between 
their  position  and  that  of  the  old  Moral  Sense  School 
there  is  this  important  difference.  Hutcheson  beheved 
in  a  single,  distinctively  moral  kind  of  feeling.  Modem 
Emotionahsts  usually  deny  the  existence  of  any  such 
single  sui  generis  feehng.  Sometimes  they  have  reduced 
all  moral  approbation  to  sympathy  or  altruistic  emotion 
in  general ;  ^  but  the  more  recent  upholders  of  the 
emotional  view  refuse  to  identify  moral  approbation  or 
disapprobation  with  any  one  kind  of  emotion.  They 
regard  it  rather  as  a  complex  product  or  amalgam  of 
many  different  feelings  or  emotions — emotions  closely 
coimected  with  instincts  which  we  have  inherited  from 
our  animal  ancestors.  In  Dr.  McDougall's  recent  book 
on  Social  Psychology,  for  mstance,  it  is  insisted  that  it 
has  its  roots  in  the  maternal  instinct  and  other  kinds 
of  sympathetic  or  benevolent  feehng,  in  the  "  sense  of 
kind  "  or  the  gregarious  instinct,  but  also  in  resent- 
ment, the  imitative  instinct,   "  positive  and  negative 

*  e.g.  in  Gizvcki  and  Coit's  Manual  of  Ethical  Philosophy. 
^  This,  to  a  large  extent,  is  true  of  J.  S.  Mill. 


38  ETHICS 

self -feeling  " — all  these  complicated  by  fusion  with  one 
another. 

It  cannot  be  denied  that  the  emotional  view  is  at 
the  strongest  when  put  in  this  way.  In  the  hands  of 
modem  Anthropologists  and  comparative  Psychologists 
the  case  becomes  indefinitely  stronger  than  it  was  in 
the  hands  of  the  old  "  Moral  Sense  School  "  and  their 
modem  imitators.  Anthropology  is  the  real  trump- 
card  of  the  EmotionaUst  in  modem  times.  It  is  when 
he  turns  from  the  question  of  what  Morality  noio  is 
(which  he  frequently  forgets  to  examine)  to  the  question 
of  its  origin  that  he  is  able  to  present  the  most  plausible 
case.  And  it  is  quite  impossible  to  deny  that  the  above- 
mentioned  instincts  and  their  accompanying  emotions 
really  have  much  to  do  with  the  emergence  of  what  we 
call  Morahty  in  a  savage  tribe.  It  cannot  be  denied 
that  when  we  see  a  squirrel  making  a  hoard  of  nuts  and 
resenting  any  interference  with  it  on  the  part  of  other 
squirrels,  we  see  the  germs  which  in  primitive  man 
developed  into  the  idea  of  property  and  the  moral 
condemnation  of  stealing.  It  is  impossible  to  deny 
that  punishment  and  the  more  primitive  ideas  about 
justice  have  their  origin  in  the  instinct  of  revenge. 
Marital  jealousy  has  much  to  do  with  the  growth  of 
Monogamy  and  the  various  moral  rules  associated  with 
it.  And  the  social  instincts  which  are  exhibited  in 
rudimentary  forms  even  by  the  lower  animals  seem 
amply  sufficient  to  account  for  that  highest  element  in 
savage  morality  which  is  constituted  by  devotion  to 
the  interests  of  the  family  and  the  tribe.  That  these 
instincts  and  emotions  do  to  a  very  large  extent  ex- 
plain why  particular  acts  first  came  to  be  thought  right 
or  wrong  cannot  be  doubted.  It  may  even  be  questioned 
whether  the  notion  of  right  and  wrong  in  general,  as 
it  exists  in  very  primitive  minds,  represents  anything 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS         39 

more  than  these  emotions,  from  which  certain  general 
rules  have  been  extracted  by  the  savage  himself  or  by 
the  modem  investigator.  The  very  essence  of  MoraHty, 
as  it  presents  itself  to  the  developed  human  mind,  is, 
as  we  have  seen,  this  notion  of  an  objective  standard. 
But  it  is  not  easy  to  discover  any  such  notion  in  the 
most  primitive  forms  of  Morality.  Certainly  we  can 
only  trace  the  barest  germs  of  it  in  the  mind  of  the 
savage,  as  it  is  admittedly  wanting  in  that  of  the 
animal  from  which  primitive  man  was  evolved.  But 
even  if  it  were  to  be  established  that  such  a  notion  was 
wholly  absent  from  savage  Morality,  that  would  not 
prove  that  our  Morality  is  not  something  more.  If  it 
could  be  shown  that  Socrates'  parents  and  all  the  men 
and  women  who  had  ever  lived  up  to  his  time  were 
absolutely  destitute  of  what  we  understand  by  a  sense 
of  duty,  that  would  not  alter  the  fact  that  Socrates 
possessed  such  a  consciousness  of  duty,  nor  would  it  in 
the  smallest  degree  affect  the  validity  of  the  concept. 
All  our  higher  intellectual  notions  have  emerged  gradu- 
ally in  the  history  of  the  race,  just  as  they  emerge 
gradually  in  the  development  of  the  individual  child. 
The  intellectual  concept  of  Dutj'  has  gradually  super- 
vened upon  the  mere  emotional  impulses  of  primitive 
man,  just  as  a  rational  concept  of  Causality  has  gradu- 
ally taken  the  place  of  that  mere  "  association  of  ideas  " 
which  enables  the  lower  animals  and  the  youngest 
infants  to  profit  to  some  extent  by  their  experiences. 
Of  course  when  it  is  suggested  that  Socrates  may  have 
been  the  first  man  in  whose  consciousness  the  concept 
of  duty  emerged,  the  matter  is  put  in  an  exaggerated 
way.  In  the  intellectual  w'orld,  as  in  the  physical, 
Nature  does  not  commonly  make  such  violent  leaps. 
The  notion  of  an  objective  Morahty  can  be  discovered 
in  Hterature  that  is  much  older  than  Socrates,  and  I 


40  ETHICS 

have  no  doubt  that  germs  of  it  can  be  found  in  the 
ideas  even  of  very  primitive  savages — especially  in  the 
most  primitive  notions  of  Justice.  Still,  it  is  important 
to  recognize  that  MoraHty  as  it  existed  in  the  savage 
was  mainly  a  matter  of  emotion,  and  that  it  Is  only 
in  the  mind  of  the  developed  human  being  that  the 
notion  can  be  discovered  in  a  very  exphcit  form  ;  but 
this  admission  throws  no  doubt  whatever  upon  the  truth 
of  the  rationahstic  theory.  We  do  not  doubt  the 
vaHdity  of  the  multiplication-table  because  the  lower 
animals,  and  (it  may  be)  some  savages  are  incapable  of 
recognizing  its  truth. 

There  are  certain  ethical  propositions  which  appeal 
to  the  developed  inteUigence  as  no  less  self-evidently 
true  than  the  proposition  "  two  straight  Hnes  cannot 
inclose  a  space  "  or  "  2  +  2  =  4."  What  these  proposi- 
tions are  is  a  further  question  which  will  be  discussed  in 
our  next  chapter.  I  will  only  by  anticipation  say  that 
to  my  own  mind  such  propositions  as  "  a  large  amount 
of  good  is  intrinsically  more  valuable  than  a  smaller," 
or  (what  is  the  same  thing)  "ought  always  to  be  promoted 
in  preference  to  a  smaller."  or,  again,  the  proposition 
that  "  pleasure  is  intrinsically  more  valuable  than  pain  " 
are  instances  of  such  immediate  or  a  priori  judgements. 
When  they  are  put  into  this  abstract  form,  it  is  possible 
that  writers  who  are  pledged  to  the  emotional  view  of 
Morality  might  deny  that  they  found  them  self-evident ; 
but  it  would  not  be  difficult  to  show  that  they  are 
presupposed  in  the  actual  judgements  which  they  pro- 
nounce upon  conduct.  Still  more  easy  would  it  be  to 
show  from  the  writings  of  such  men  that  they  really 
beheve  in  the  objectivity  of  their  own  judgements.  Such 
writers  as  Professor  Westermarck  may  theoretically 
recognize  that  on  their  own  view  of  the  matter  no  such 
objectivity  can  be  claimed  for  them  ;    but  on  almost 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS  41 

every  page  of  their  writings  they  constantly  speak  of  a 
liigher  and  lower  Morality  ;  and  they  never  appear  to 
have  any  serious  doubt  that,  where  they  differ,  their 
o^vn  civilized  notions  of  Morality  are  intrinsically  higher 
and  truer  than  those  of  a  savage.  In  that  absolutely 
unavoidable  use  of  the  terms  "  higher  "  and  "  lower  " 
they  betray  the  existence  in  their  own  mind  of  that 
very  category  of  good  the  existence  of  which  they  deny 
with  their  lips. 

On  the  whole,  then,  I  believe  that  Rationalists  are 
right  against  the  Moral  Sense  School  or  any  other  kind 
of  Emotionalism.  At  the  same  time  Ethical  Rational- 
ists have  often  enormously  exaggerated  the  purely 
rational  character  of  our  own  actual  moral  judge- 
ments, and  of  the  conduct  which  results  from  them. 
Thus— 

(a)  It  has  sometimes  been  forgotten  that,  though  the 
judgement  that  an  action  is  right  comes  from  the  Reason, 
the  action  cannot  be  actually  performed  without  a 
desire.  In  some  cases,  no  doubt,  this  desire  is  simply 
what  Sidgwick  calls  a  "  desire  to  do  what  is  right  and 
reasonable  as  such."  But  this  need  not  always  be  the 
case,  even  with  the  actions  that  we  commonly  regard 
as  actions  of  the  noblest  type.  We  need  not  (with 
Kant)  declare  that  the  action  of  a  man  who  sacrifices 
himself  for  Ins  wife  and  family  from  pure  disinterested 
afifection  possesses  no  moral  value  because  it  is  not 
done  from  a  pure  sense  of  duty.  Moral  Reason  may 
pronounce  the  act  to  be  right  and  to  possess  high  moral 
value,  though  the  agent  may  not  consciously  and 
abstractly  have  reflected  that  it  was  his  duty. 

(&)  It  must  not  be  supposed  that  even  in  determining 
what  ought  to  be  done  the  best  men  are  always  guided 
by  a  deHberate  judgement  of  Reason.  Men's  ideas  as 
to  the  particular   things  which   they  ought  to  do  are 


42  ETHICS 

largely  dependent  upon  custom  or  authority,  or,  in 
other  cases,  upon  the  influence  of  strong  sympathetic 
and  other  emotions  ;  but  even  in  men  little  influenced 
in  their  views  as  to  what  acts  are  right  or  ^VTong  by 
consciously  rational  reflection  and  chiefly  dominated 
by  emotion,  we  can  detect  the  notion  of  duty  ;  and 
we  can  detect  the  presence  of  rational  conceptions  in 
the  moral  consciousness  of  the  community,  even  when 
the  individual  rarely  does  more  than  passively  acquiesce 
in  the  ideal  of  his  social  environment.  It  is  Reason 
that  gives  him  the  idea  of  duty,  though  he  may  be 
largely  influenced  by  custom  or  feeling  in  judging  what 
particular  things  are  his  duty.  The  more  conscious 
and  deliberate  action  of  Reason  comes  in  chiefly  where 
there  is  a  conflict  between  one  emotion  and  another,  or 
where  some  doubt  has  arisen  as  to  whether  the  cus- 
tomary standard  of  morality  is  valid.  A  man  like  St. 
Francis  of  Assisi  did  not  solve  ethical  problems  by  the 
sort  of  abstract  reflection  which  dominated  the  conduct 
of  Kant.  He  was  chiefly  influenced  by  such  emotions 
as  gratitude  to  Christ  and  sympathy  for  his  fellow-men ; 
but  he  felt  the  inclination  to  selfishness,  sloth,  cowardice 
as  much  as  other  men,  and  the  unselfish  emotions  pre- 
vailed over  the  selfish  not  simply  (it  is  probable)  because 
they  were  natiu-ally  stronger,  but  because  he  recognized 
them  to  be  intrinsically  higher.  It  was  just  in  this  judge- 
ment that  the  one  kind  of  desire,  or  the  action  prompted 
by  such  desire,  was  higher  than  another  that  the  moral 
Reason  asserted  itself.  It  must  not  be  supposed  that 
the  ideal  of  human  conduct  is  conduct  uninfluenced  by 
desire  or  emotion.  The  ideal  fimction  of  Reason  is  not 
to  suppress  or  extinguish  the  desires,  but  to  control 
them — ^to  choose  between  the  higher  and  the  lower 
impulse  and  to  reinforce  the  higher.  The  ideal  is  no 
doubt  that  the  desire  to  do  what  Reason  pronounces  to 


THE    MORAL    CONSCIOUSNESS  43 

be  right  should  be  paramount,  where  desires  confliet ;  but 
the  greater  part  of  the  acts  of  most  good  men  will  no 
doubt  be  governed  by  other  impulses — habit,  custom, 
authority,  emotion — with  a  merely  latent  consciousness 
that  the  impulses  are  good  and  that  there  is  no  need  to 
check  or  inhibit  their  operation. 

(c)  It  is  quite  true  that  in  many  cases  oui  moral 
judgements  are  accompanied  by  a  characteristic  emotion, 
or,  rather,  by  many  diiierent  kinds  of  emotion.  In  some 
cases  this  emotion  is  excited  directly  by  the  conduct 
approved  or  condemned  apart  from  any  reflection  upon 
its  rightness  or  wrongness  ;  in  others  the  emotion  is 
excited  solely  by  the  consciousness  that  the  action  is 
right  or  wrong.  In  this  last  case  it  is  especially  clear 
that  the  emotion  presupposes  the  judgement  and  can- 
not possibly  explain  it — any  more  than  the  pleasure 
arising  from  the  satisfaction  of  the  desire  can  explain 
the  desire. 

(d)  It  has  often  been  supposed  by  ethical  Rationahsts 
not  merely  that  ethical  judgements  are  the  work  of 
Reason,  but  that  these  judgements  can  be  pronounced 
without  any  knowledge  derived  from  experience.  A 
purely  rational  intelligence  moving  as  it  were  in  vacuo, 
having  no  knowledge  of  human  nature  {i.e.  of  anji;hing 
in  man  but  his  Reason) — of  human  desires,  emotions, 
pleasiu-es,  pains,  of  the  structure  of  human  society  and 
the  tendency  of  human  acts — could  produce,  as  it  were, 
out  of  the  depths  of  its  own  self-consciousness,  a  de- 
tailed code  of  rules  suitable  for  the  guidance  of  any 
and  every  human  society. 

The  most  famous  of  the  writers  who  exhibit  this 
tendency  is  Kant.  Kant  was  no  doubt  quite  right  in 
calling  the  moral  judgement  a  " categorical  imperative" 
— that  is,  a  command  the  obhgation  of  which  is  not 
conditional  upon  any  subjective  wish  or  inclination  on 


44  ETHICS 

the  part  of  the  individual  whose  Reason  recognizes  the 
obligation  ;  but  that  doctrine  does  not  carry  "with  it 
(as  it  sometimes  supposed  it  to  do)  the  imphcation  that 
the  details  of  duty  can  be  discovered  without  any  refer- 
ence to  experience,  or  that  moral  laws  must  express 
themselves  in  hard-and-fast  rules  which  admit  of  no 
exceptions — rules  which  prescribe  the  same  kind  of 
conduct  in  all  possible  combinations  of  circumstances, 
and  the  obHgation  of  which  is  quite  independent  of 
consequences  not  merely  to  the  individual  but  to  society 
at  large. 

The  question  thus  raised  is  in  effect  the  problem  of 
the  Moral  Criterion,  and  that  is  a  question  which  we 
have  not  yet  considered.  So  far  I  have  been  en- 
deavouring to  show  merely  that  the  judgement  "  this  is 
right  "  is  a  rational  judgement,  involving  a  distinct 
category  of  the  human  thought  as  much  as  the  judge- 
ment "  A  is  the  cause  of  B  "  or  "  the  whole  is  greater 
than  its  part,"  or  "  If  A  is  B  and  E  is  C,  then  A  is  C." 
We  have  not  yet  discussed  what  acts  in  particular 
Reason  pronounces  to  be  right,  or  by  what  sort  of 
procedure  Reason  operates  in  deciding  whether  an  act 
is  right  or  wrong.  That  problem  will  be  the  subject  of 
the  next  chapter,  and  the  reader  will  be  in  a  much 
better  position  to  judge  whether  ethical  propositions  are 
rational  judgements  or  a  mere  formulation  of  human 
emotions  or  desires  when  he  discovers  what  are  the 
sort  of  propositions  for  which  this  rational  character  is 
claimed. 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  45 


CHAPTER    IV 

THE    MORAL    CRITERION 

We  have  now  reached  the  question  which  it  is  really  the 
supreme  object  of  Ethics  to  answer — the  question  "  How 
are  we  to  discover  what  actions  in  particular  are  right 
or  wrong  ?  "  All  our  previous  enquiries  may  be  re- 
garded as  preliminaries  to  the  treatment  of  this  great 
and  practically  all -important  problem.  It  is  of  no  use 
to  know  generalities  about  the  meaning  of  right  and 
wrong  unless  we  can  discover  some  method  of  discover- 
ing what  particular  actions  are  right  and  wTong  ;  and 
if  we  can  do  this,  it  is  probable  that  our  answer  to  this 
question  will  throw  more  light  than  anything  else  upon 
the  meaning  of  right  and  wrong  in  general 

To  this  fundamental  question  there  have  been  two 
traditional  answers.  According  to  one  view  we  dis- 
cover what  is  right  or  wrong  by  an  immediate  judgement 
or  "  intuition  "  which  tells  us  that  this  or  that  act  is 
right  without  any  knowledge  of  its  consequences  or  of 
its  bearing  upon  the  general  well-being  either  of  the 
individual  or  of  society.  This  view  is  commonly  known 
as  Intuitionism.  Sometimes  it  is  supposed  that  the 
intuition  relates  to  each  particular  act  in  detail ;  the 
judgement  is  supposed  to  be,  as  it  were,  an  ad  hoc  judge- 
ment ;  by  others  it  is  supposed  that  the  intuitions  relate 
to  whole  classes  of  action,  the  rightness  or  WTongness 
of  the  particular  act  being  deduced  from  the  general 
rules,  just  as  a  Judge  applies  a  general  rule  of  law  to 
the  decisions  of  particular  cases.  According  to  the 
first  theory  (to  which  Professor  Sidgwick  has  applied 
the  name  "  empirical  "  or  "  perceptional  "  Intuition- 
ism), on    each    occasion    on  which   I  have  to  decide 


46  ETHICS 

whether  to  speak  the  truth  or  not,  an  immediate  in- 
tuition arises  in  my  mind  telling  me  that  the  He  would 
be  wrong  or  (it  may  be  under  certain  circumstances) 
that  it  would  be  right.  According  to  the  other  view 
(which  Sidgwick  has  called  "  Philosophical  Intui- 
tionism  "),  I  know  a  priori,  and  apart  from  all  con- 
siderations of  social  consequences,  that  all  lying  is 
wrong  ;  if  I  see  that  this  particular  act  falls  within  the 
general  category  of  lying,  then  I  know  it  would  be 
wrong  to  do  it.  It  certainly  conduces  to  clearness  to 
divide  Intuitional  systems  in  this  way,  but  the  dis- 
tinction is  one  which  is  not  always  made  by  the  intui- 
tional writers  themselves  :  many  of  them  adopt  one 
or  the  other  interpretation  of  their  principle,  just  as 
they  find  most  convenient  to  meet  the  controversial 
needs  of  the  moment.  It  should  be  added  that,  in 
saying  that  no  account  is  taken  of  the  consequences  of 
the  action,  we  are  putting  the  system  in  its  extremest 
form.  Many  writers  who  would  on  the  whole  class 
themselves  under  this  head — who  at  all  events  emphati-  ■ 
cally  reject  the  Utihtarian  view  of  the  matter — would 
admit  that  to  a  certain  extent  and  in  certam  cases 
consequences  have  to  be  considered.  The  difficulty  of 
these  less  extreme  Intuitionists  has  always  been  to 
explain  when  consequences  are,  and  when  they  are  not, 
to  be  considered.  At  all  events  they  would  all  agree 
that  in  some  cases  acts  are  seen  to  be  right  or  wrong  no 
matter  what  their  consequences  may  be. 

According  to  the  other  view  we  judge  of  the  conse- 
quences of  acts  by  attending  to  their  consequences 
either  for  the  individual  or  (as  is  more  usually  held) 
for  Society  at  large ;  that  act  is  right  which  \d\\.  pro- 
duce the  greatest  amount  of  good  on  the  whole  for  the 
individual  or  for  Society.  Such  systems  are  usually 
spoken  of  as  Utilitarian  ;  and  it  is  part  of  the  tradi- 
tional Utihtarian  creed  that  this  good,  which  is  the 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  47 

ultimate  end  of  all  human  action,  is  simply  a  maximum 
of  pleasure  and  a  minimum  of  pain.  Utilitarianism  is 
in  general  usage  understood  to  include  Hedonism — the 
doctrine  that  pleasure  is  the  only  good.  But  it  will  be 
observed  at  once  that  there  is  no  necessary  connection 
between  the  two  elements  in  the  traditional  Utilitarian 
doctrine.  It  is  quite  possible  to  hold  that  acts  are, 
indeed,  right  or  wrong  according  as  they  promote  either 
individual  or  social  well-being,  and  yet  not  to  hold  that 
well-being  means  merely  pleasure. 

A  better  classification  of  ethical  systems  than  that 
afforded  by  the  traditional  opposition  between  Intui- 
tional and  Utilitarian  systems  would  be  afforded  by 
dividing  them  (with  Paulsen)  into  intuitional  or  (as 
he  calls  it)  "  formahstic  "  and  "  teleological  "  systems. 
Teleological  systems  are  systems  which  regard  actions 
as  right  or  wrong  in  so  far  as  they  tend  or  do  not  tend 
to  the  production  of  a  certain  end  or  good,  no  matter 
what  be  the  nature  of  that  good.  Teleological  systems 
will  be  further  classified  in  two  ways  :  (1)  according 
as  the  end  which  they  tend  to  promote  is  individual  or 
universal ;  (2)  according  to  the  interpretation  which  is 
given  to  this  end.  We  may  have  an  Egoistic  Hedonism 
which  regards  the  individual's  pleasure  as  the  true  end 
for  each  individual,  or  a  UniversaHstic  Hedonism  which 
regards  the  general  pleasure  as  the  end  by  reference  to 
which  individual  acts  are  to  be  pronounced  right  or 
\vTong.  Or,  again,  it  niay  be  held  that  the  true  end  is 
not  pleasure  but  moral  well-being,  or  moral  well-being 
+  pleasure,  or  again  intellectual  activity ;  or  the  good 
may  be  supposed  to  consist  in  all  these  elements  and 
others  besides — and  in  each  of  these  cases  there  will  be 
a  further  subdivision  according  as  the  well-being  of  the 
individual  or  of  Society  is  regarded.  We  thus  get  the 
following  classifications  of  ethical  systems  according  to 
the  view  they  take  of  the  ethical  criterion.     It  is  of 


48  ETHICS 

course  not  the  only  possible  classification  ;  and  if  we 
looked  to  the  practical  tendency  or  ethical  tone  of  the 
systems,  it  is  perhaps  not  the  most  important.  The 
most  fundamental  distinction  from  that  point  of  view  is 
undoubtedly  that  between  hedonistic  systems  and  non- 
hedonistic  ;  but  for  the  particular  purpose  of  the  present 
discussion  this  classification  will  be  found  useful — 


I.  Intuitionism.     (1)  Empirical  or  Perceptional. 
(2)  Philosophical. 
II.  Teleological  systems.     The  good  may  be  interpreted  as — 

(i.)  Pleasure — (a)  for  theindividual(Egoistic  Hedonism). 
(6)  for  all  humanity  (Universalistic  Hedo- 
nism or  Utilitarianism). 
(ii.)  Moral  Well-being— (a)  for  the  individual  (Individu- 
alistic Perfectionism). 
{h)  for  humanity  (Universalistic 
Perfectionism), 
(iii.)  A  total  Well-being  ^  including  Morality,  intellectual 
and  aesthetic  good,  &c.,  and  recognizing  a  distinc- 
tion between  higher  and  lower  pleasures, 
(a)  for  the  individual  (Individualistic  Eudsemonism). 
(6)  for  humanity  (Ideal  Utilitarianism). 

Two  or  three  further  remarks  may  be  made  on  this 
classification — 

(i.)  Since  almost  all  non -hedonistic  systems  regard 
Morality  as  part  of  the  individual's  good  and  the  pro- 
motion of  other  people's  good  as  at  least  an  important 
part  of  Morality,  the  distinction  between  the  indivi- 
dualistic and  the  universalistic  variety  of  these  systems 
is  not  so  sharply  drawn  as  might  be  expected.  There 
are  many  writers  whom  it  would  be  difficult  to  classify 
definitely  under  either  head  ;  some  of  these  {e.g.  T.  H. 
Green)  go  so  far  as  to  maintain  that  no  true  good  can 
be  either  wholly  individual  or  wholly  social. ^ 

^  The  Greek  would  say  evZaifiovla. 

*  On  snob  a  view  it  is  clear  that  nothing  but  Morality  itself  can 
possibly  be  good  at  all.     Such  a  position  is  difficult  to  reconcile 


THE  MORAL   CRITERION  49 

(ii.)  Since  moral  well-being  is  made  up  of  individual 
good  acts,  it  is  not  very  easy  to  distinguish  the  method 
which  I  have  called  Individualistic  Perfectionism  from 
purely  intuitional  systems  ;  still,  in  so  far  as  it  is 
thought  that  moral  action  is  to  be  governed  by  an  ideal 
of  character  or  life  as  a  whole  rather  than  by  individual 
and  isolated  promptings  of  the  moral  consciousness  in 
each  particular  case  {pro  re  nata),  a  system  tends  to 
pass  from  the  intuitional  into  the  teleological  class — still 
more  so  when  (as  with  T.  H.  Green)  the  moral  well- 
bemg  of  society  rather  than  of  the  individual  is  made 
the  criterion. 

(iii.)  A  fourth  main  division  of  teleological  systems 
might  be  established  for  those  who  hold  that  intel- 
lectual (including  aesthetic)  well-being  or  culture  by 
itself  constitutes  the  end.  But  this  has  been  seldom 
systematically  maintained.  It  might  be  possible,  how- 
ever, to  regard  Nietzsche  (in  so  far  as  that  writer  can 
be  credited  with  any  definite  and  consistent  Ethic)  as 
representing  such  a  system  in  its  individualistic  form 
(though  liis  exaltation  of  individual  power  or  force  would 
be  hard  to  bring  into  this  scheme),  and  E.  von  Hartmann 
as  representing  its  universahstic  variety.  The  truth  is 
that  the  number  of  possible  views  of  the  end  is  potenti- 
ally unhmited.  There  is  nothing  except  the  obvious 
and  intrinsic  unreasonableness  of  doing  so  in  some 
cases  to  prevent  any  single  element  of  conscious  life 
from  being  regarded  as  the  only  good  in  human  Hfe ; 
but  the  above  classification  will  be  found  roughl)^  to 
correspond  with  the  main  divisions  of  actual  opinion. 

with  the  admission,  which  the  same  writers  invariably  make  on 
other  occasions,  that  the  important  virtue  of  Justice  consists  in 
showing  a  due  estimate  of  the  relative  importance  of  one  man's 
good  (whether  that  can  be  the  man  himself,  or  some  one  else),  and 
that  of  each  and  every  other  man.  The  very  possibility  of  injustice 
implies  the  possibility  that  A  may  enjoy  a  real  good  which  neverthe- 
less involves  an  injury  to  B,  which  Green's  view  would  make 
impossible. 

D 


50  ETHICS 

Let  us  now  examine  the  arguments  commonly  ad- 
duced in  favour  of  the  two  sharply-opposed  traditional 
ways  of  thinking  commonly  known  as  Intuitionism  and 
Utilitarianism.  We  will  consider  them  firstly  in  their 
extremest  and  most  sharply  opposed  forms. 

The  Intuitionist  asks  whether  we  do  not  as  a  matter 
of  fact  decide  that  acts  are  right  or  wrong  without  any 
conscious  reflection  upon  their  influence  upon  so  remote 
an  end  as  universal  well-being.  Children  and  quite 
uneducated  persons,  he  will  point  out,  immediately  and 
(as  it  were)  instinctively  condemn  lying  without  any 
reflection,  or  even  any  capacity  for  reflecting,  upon  the 
commercial  and  social  conveniences  secured  to  society 
by  the  habit  of  truth-speaking.  They  condemn  stealing, 
though  they  would  be  quite  unable  to  ^vrite  a  defence 
of  private  property  against  a  Communist  or  an  Anarchist, 
and  so  on.  And  these  rules  of  conduct  are  frequently 
recognized  and  observed  by  people  who  seem  to  trouble 
themselves  remarkably  Httle  in  other  ways  about  the 
general  welfare.  It  is,  moreover,  frequently  insisted, 
though  this  is  not  absolutely  necessary  to  Intuitionism 
(particularly  in  its  perceptional  form),  that  some  or  all 
of  these  moral  rules  admit  of  no  exception,  even  when 
the  introduction  of  exceptions  would  seem  clearly  to 
produce  a  balance  of  pleasure  and  no  compensating 
pain.  Kant,  for  instance,  wrote  a  short  treatise  against 
a  "supposed  right  of  telling  Hes  from  benevolent 
motives."  Moreover,  in  some  cases  it  is  at  least  plaus- 
ible to  doubt  whether,  even  as  a  general  rule  and  in  the 
long  run,  some  of  the  rules  of  the  accepted  Morahty 
could  really  be  defended  as  conducive  to  a  maximum  of 
pleasure,  so  long  at  least  as  all  pleasure  is  regarded  as 
of  exactly  equal  value — the  condemnation,  for  instance, 
of  suicide  and  the  whole  system  of  rules  included  in  the 
interpretation  placed  by  Christian  communities  upon 
the  Seventh  Commandment.     Further,  it  is  contended 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  51 

that  the  very  strongest  conviction  that  we  have  is  the 
belief  that  the  moral  act  in  itself,  or  the  character 
and  general  direction  of  the  Will  which  it  represents, 
possesses  an  intrinsic  value  as  distinct  from  the  value 
of  any  further  effect  which  may  as  a  matter  of  fact  be  pro- 
duced by  the  right  act.  We  regard  MoraUty  as  an  end 
in  itself,  while  we  treat  the  pleasure  which  actually  results 
from  some  right  acts  (some  would  even  say)  as  not  a  good 
at  all,  or  at  all  events  as  a  good  of  very  inferior  value. 

To  these  arguments  the  UtiHtarian  would  reply  in 
some  such  way  as  this — 

1.  He  would  freely  admit  that  to  a  large  extent  it 
is  true  that  we  do  often  assent  to  certain  moral  rules 
or  pronounce  judgements  upon  individual  acts  without 
conscious  reflection  on  the  consequences  to  any  one, 
still  less  on  the  ultimate  consequences  to  social  well- 
being  ;  but  this,  he  would  contend,  is  sufficiently 
accounted  for  in  some  cases  by  early  education  and  the 
accepted  code  which  Society,  by  example  and  precept, 
reward  and  punishment,  praise  and  blame,  has  been 
impressing  upon  our  minds  all  through  our  lives.  In 
other  cases  the  evil  consequences  of  an  act  are  so 
obvious  that  practically  no  reflection  is  required  to 
stamp  the  act  as  wrong.  The  good  of  Society  is  made 
up  of  lesser  goods.  When  we  see  that  an  act  produces 
pain,  we  immediately  condemn  it  unless  we  have  any 
reason  to  suspect  that  the  pain  will  result  in  an  ultimate 
increase  of  pleasure.  When  we  see  that  a  child's  clothes 
have  caught  fire,  we  do  not  need  to  reflect  on  any  conse- 
quences for  universal  well-being  before  we  make  up  our 
minds  that  it  is  a  duty  to  extinguish  the  flames,  even  at 
the  cost  of  some  risk  to  ourselves.  It  is  clear  that  the 
act  will  conduce  to  pleasure  and  to  the  avoidance  of 
pain.  We  shoidd  feel  an  equally  instinctive  desire  to 
kick  out  of  the  room  a  man  whom  we  saw  making 
incisions  in  the  flesh  of  a  luiman  being  if  we  did  not 


52  ETHICS 

know  that  he  was  a  Surgeon,  and  that  the  makmg  of 
incisions  will  tend  to  save  the  man's  life.  Were  a  com- 
petent Phj^sician  to  suggest  that  the  burning  of  the  child's 
clothes  upon  its  back  would  cure  it  of  a  fever,  every 
reasonable  person  would  consider  it  his  duty  to  recon- 
sider his  prima  facie  view  of  the  situation.  The  Utili- 
tarian does  not  deny  that  in  most  cases  we  act  upon 
some  accepted  rule  of  conduct  or  upon  our  own  imme- 
diate impulse  without  any  elaborate  calculation  of 
social  consequences.  Nor  does  he  deny  the  desirabiHty 
of  the  indi\idual  conforming  in  the  vast  majority  of 
cases  to  the  accepted  rule,  which  he  will  regard  as  pre- 
sumably ha\dng  its  origin  m  the  experience  of  the  race, 
or  obeying  the  altruistic  impulses  which  certainly  pro- 
mote the  immediate  well-being  of  one  or  more  indi- 
viduals. The  question  is  not  so  much  as  to  the  existence 
of  intuitions  or  apparent  intuitions  about  conduct,  but 
as  to  the  source  of  their  ultimate  authority  or  vahdity, 
and  consequently  as  to  their  finality.  In  the  vast 
majority  of  cases  it  is  inevitable  and  desirable  that  we 
should  act  without  any  such  elaborate  calculation.  The 
question  is  how  we  are  to  decide  the  matter  when  we 
begin  to  doubt  whether  the  accepted  rule  may  not  turn 
out  to  be  no  less  mistaken  and  ungroimded  than  manj'- 
other  rules  which  were  once  universally  accepted,  and  are 
now  universall}^  rejected ;  or  to  suspect  that  the  indul- 
gence of  the  first  momentary  impulse  is  really  injirrious 
to  the  general  well-being.  The  first  impulse  of  any  humane 
person  with  a  shilMng  in  his  pocket,  on  seeing  a  hungry 
beggar  in  the  street,  is  to  give  him  that  shilling.  If  he 
put  aside  all  that  he  knew  from  experience  and  the 
teaching  of  Political  Economy  about  the  effects  of  in- 
discriminate almsgiving,  he  would  inevitably  treat  that 
impulse  as  the  voice  of  Conscience.  When  he  takes 
into  account  this  knowledge,  a  reasonable  man  usually 
changes  his  judgement,  and  holds  that  it  is  his  duty  to 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  53 

keep  the  shilling  in  his  pocket.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  the 
Utilitarian  does  not  necessarily  dispute  the  existence  or 
authority  of  Conscience  or  refuse  to  obey  its  dictates. 
He  only  refuses  to  regard  Conscience  as  a  blind  and 
unreflecting  impulse  ;  and  insists  that  its  verdict  must 
depend  upon  a  rational  regard  for  the  consequences  of 
actions  so  far  as  such  consequences  can  be  foreseen. 
He  finds  that  so  far  from  Conscience  bidding  him  act 
without  reflection,  it  is  really  Conscience  that  bids  him 
stop  and  think.  And  when  he  does  so,  he  finds  it  im- 
possible to  regard  it  as  right  to  bring  about  what  is 
not  really  good  ;  and  if  every  act  ought  to  reahze  some 
good,  the  supreme  end  of  all  action  must  surely  be  to 
realize  the  greatest  attainable  good. 

2.  The  most  obvious  lines  of  attack  adopted  by  the 
Utilitarian  writers  is  to  point  to  the  immense  variety  of 
contradictory  and  inconsistent  rules  of  conduct  which 
have  at  diflerent  times,  to  different  nations  or  to  different 
individuals,  presented  themselves  as  self -evidently  true 
and  binding.  The  traditional  method  of  combating 
Intuitionism  from  the  time  of  John  Locke  to  that  of 
Herbert  Spencer  has  been  to  present  the  reader  with  a 
list  of  cruel  and  abominable  savage  customs,  ridiculous 
superstitions,  acts  of  religious  fanaticism  and  intolerance, 
which  have  all  alike  seemed  self-e\adently  good  and 
right  to  the  peoples  or  individuals  who  have  practised 
them.  There  is  hardly  a  vice  or  a  crime  (according  to 
our  own  moral  standard)  which  has  not  at  some  time  or 
other  in  some  circumstances  been  looked  upon  as  a 
moral  and  religious  duty.  SteaUng  was  accounted  \\t- 
tuous  for  the  young  Spartan  and  among  the  Indian 
caste  of  Thugs.  In  the  ancient  world  Piracy,  i.e.  robbery 
and  murder,  was  a  respectable  profession.  To  the 
medieval  Christian  rehgious  persecution  was  the  highest 
of  duties,  and  so  on. 

At  first  sight  this  line  of  argument  will  seem  to  many 


54  ETHICS 

the  most  unanswerable.  And  no  doubt  if  the  Intui- 
tionist  really  does  maintain  that,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
aU  human  beings  have  always  judged  the  same  things 
to  be  right  or  wrong,  if  he  even  maintains  with  the 
cautious  Bishop  Butler  that  "  almost  any  fair  man 
in  almost  any  circumstance  "  will  know  what  is  the 
right  thing  to  do,  then  the  existence  of  these  diverse 
and  inconsistent  moral  ideals  is  sufficient  to  refute  his 
contention.  We  need  not  look  beyond  the  Old  Testa- 
ment and  Homer  to  see  that  moral  ideals  have  not 
always  been  the  same  ;  and  even  among  the  most 
enlightened  and  morally  developed  individuals  at  the 
present  day — in  the  same  nation,  in  the  same  class,  on 
the  same  educational  level — there  are  unquestionably 
very  considerable  differences  not  merely  as  to  the  right 
course  of  action  in  some  particular  collocation  of  cir- 
cumstances but  even  about  general  questions  of  ethical 
principle.  But  Intuitionism  is  not  necessarily  com- 
mitted to  the  denial  of  these  things.  All  modem 
Intuitionists  admit  that  the  moral  Consciousness  has 
grown  and  developed  just  as  much  as  the  intellectual 
side  of  our  consciousness.  Everybody  will  admit  that 
the  difierence  between  a  valid  syllogism  and  a  syllogism 
with  a  fallacy  in  it,  between  a  good  argument  and  a 
bad,  is  something  that  must  be  discerned  immediate^, 
intuitively,  or  not  at  all.  But  it  does  not  follow  that 
all  men  are  equally  good  arguers  or  judges  of  argument. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  illogical  thinkers  are  more  numerous 
than  logical  ones.  It  is  quite  possible  to  maintain  that 
Morahty  consists  in  a  body  of  isolated  rules  or  isolated 
and  disconnected  judgements  discernible  by  intuition 
without  any  reference  to  consequences,  although  it  is 
admitted  that  the  knowledge  of  such  truths  has  been 
gradually  developed,  and  that  individuals  even  now 
vary  indefinitely  in  their  power  of  discerning  them. 
Self-evident  truths  are  not  truths  which  are  evident 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  55 

to  everybody.  Few,  if  any,  cultivated  Moralists  would 
explicitly  contend  that  what  they  regard  as  self-evident 
moral  axioms  or  self -evidently  true  judgements  in  par- 
ticular cases  have  been  or  are  actually  assented  to  by 
all  human  beings,  although  even  at  the  present  day 
An ti -utilitarian  Moralists  do  show  a  disposition  to 
assume  a  greater  identity  of  moral  ideals  than  actually 
exists.  One  reason  for  this  is  that  the  cases  usually 
taken  as  examples  of  self-evident  moral  truths  are 
negative  rules.  A  general  agreement  that  murder, 
theft,  and  cruelty  are  wrong  may  exist  amidst  very  great 
diversities  of  view  as  to  the  positive  ideal  of  human  life. 

3.  Though  a  certain  number  of  moral  rules  will  be 
generally  assented  to  so  long  as  they  are  expressed  in 
vague  and  general  terms,  these  rules  turn  out  on  reflec- 
tion to  be  quite  insufficient  for  the  guidance  of  conduct. 
We  readily  assent  to  the  propositions  "  I  ought  to  be 
benevolent,  just,  honest,"  &c.,  but  when  we  come  to 
details,  we  find  that  the  general  agreement  which  is 
usually  insisted  upon  by  the  Intuitionist  begins  to  dis- 
appear :  nor  does  the  right  course  of  action  alw^ays  seem 
obvious  even  to  the  individual.  When  this  is  the  case, 
it  will  commonly  be  found  that  men  really  do  appeal  to 
social  consequences.  WTien  a  man  begins  to  dispute  or 
to  have  doubts  in  his  o^^^l  mind  as  to  the  morality  of 
war,  of  gambling,  of  sport.,  of  vivisection,  or  when  a 
Christian  and  a  Mahometan  dispute  as  to  the  morality 
of  Polygamy,  it  is  usually  upon  the  balance  of  advan- 
tages and  disadvantages  that  the  argument  turns. 

4.  It  can  hardly  be  disputed  that  the  great  majority 
of  accepted  moral  rules  can  be  justifietl  on  the  ground 
of  their  tendency  to  promote  a  maximum  of  pleasure  and 
a  minimum  of  pain  ;  and,  though  primitive  man  was 
not  as  much  of  a  Utilitarian  as  the  older  Utihtarian 
writers  supposed,  the  social  ill  effects  of  murder  (at  least 
within  the  tribe),  stealing,  assault,  and  the  like  are  too 


56  ETHICS 

obvious  not  to  have  formed  both  to  the  social  and  to 
the  individual  consciousness  part  at  least  of  the  ground 
why  these  things  were  regarded  as  wrong.  Much  of 
primitive  morahty  originated  in  instincts  which  on  the 
whole  were  conducive  to  tribal  well-being  (whether  or 
not  this  was  perceived),  or  in  superstitious  beUefs  about 
Totems  and  Taboos  which  may  or  may  not  have  had 
good  social  efEects  ;  but  certain  rules  were  too  obviously 
conducive  to  social  welfare  for  their  tendency  not  to  be 
observed.  Still  more  obvious  is  this  utilitarian  justi- 
fication when  we  consider  the  causes  why  some  primitive 
moral  rules  have  survived  to  the  present  time,  while  a 
thousand  other  savage  ideas  have  been  abandoned  as 
baseless  superstitions.  In  other  cases  the  social  utility 
of  the  traditional  rule  reveals  itself  on  reflection,  although 
it  may  not  have  the  original  ground  for  its  adoption, 
e.g.  rules  against  the  marriage  of  near  kin.  The  more 
modern  UtiUtarian  MoraUsts  would  often  insist  upon  the 
efEects  of  natural  selection  in  promoting  the  survival  of 
the  tribe  whose  MoraUty  was  most  Utilitarian.  From 
these  facts  the  Utilitarian  would  argue  that  our  actual, 
accepted  Morahty  really  owes  its  origm  to  Utihtarian 
considerations,  and  that  these  same  considerations  are 
the  real  ground  for  acting  upon  instincts  and  tradi- 
tional rules,  though  they  will  occasionally  require  us 
to  act  in  opposition  to  them  where  they  have  been 
discovered  not  to  be  socially  useful,  or  where  they  have 
lost  the  social  utiUty  which  they  once  possessed. 

5.  Still  more  clearly  evident  is  the  appeal  to  conse- 
quences in  our  actual  judgements,  when  the  moral  rules 
put  forward  as  self-evident  actually  colHde  with  one  an- 
other— the  precept  of  humanity,  for  instance,  with  that 
of  veracity.  It  seems  self-evident  that  I  ought  to  speak 
the  truth,  and  equally  self-evident  that  I  ought  to  save 
life.  What  is  to  be  done  when  I  can  only  speak  the 
truth  at  the  cost  of  taking  life  {e.g.  blurting  out  bad 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  57 

news  to  a  sick  man),  and  can  only  save  life  at  the  cost 
of  a  lie  ?  Whatever  expedient  may  be  adopted  for 
solving  such  problems,  the  existence  of  these  colUsions 
is  a  final  refutation  of  the  claim  of  such  rules  to  be 
absolutely  true  and  finally  valid  deliverances  of  the 
Moral  Reason.     Reason  does  not  contradict  itself. 

6.  The  supposed  exceptionless  rules  of  conduct  put 
forth  by  at  least  one  class  of  Intuitionists  generally 
turn  out  on  reflection  to  admit  of  a  good  many  excep- 
tions which  are  practically  recognized  by  the  most 
conscientious  persons.  Few  people  will  agree  with  Kant 
as  to  the  duty  of  pointing  out  to  the  would-be  murderer 
the  whereabouts  of  his  intended  victim  if  the  truth 
could  only  be  concealed  by  means  of  a  lie.  It  may  be 
doubted  whether  English  Criminal  Law  Avould  not  even 
pronounce  a  man  who  did  so  to  be  an  accessory  before 
the  fact,  and  therefore  equally  guilty  with  the  murderer. 
The  most  logical  Intuitionists  are  men  of  the  Tolstoi 
stamp  who  really  do  hold,  and  (as  far  as  they  can)  act 
upon  the  principle  that  we  must  never  resist  force  by 
force,  never  arrest  a  thief,  must  hterally  give  to  him 
that  asketh  up  to  one's  last  pemiy  and  so  on.  But 
for  this  view  it  is  impossible  to  claim  the  general  assent 
to  which  Intuitionists  are  fond  of  appealing.  Most 
plain  men  and  most  intuitionist  philosophers  do  recog- 
nize exceptions ;  and  yet,  as  to  what  the  exceptions 
are,  there  is  no  general  consensus,  while  in  innumerable 
cases  the  individual  himself  will  often  find  no  self- 
evident  guidance  in  his  own  heart.  And  in  practice, 
whenever  the  legitimacy  of  such  exceptions  is  disputed, 
they  are  usually  defended  by  pointing  to  the  pernicious 
social  consequences  which  ^\ould  in  particular  cases 
result  from  the  application  of  the  usual  rule. 

7.  But  there  remains  a  more  formidable  difficulty 
than  any  that  has  been  mentioned.  How  are  we  going 
to  distinguish  between  an  act  and  its  consequences  ? 


58  ETHICS 

Some  consequences  are  included  in  the  meaning  of  the 
act.  Divest  an  act  of  all  the  consequences,  and  nothing 
really  remains  behind.  What  would  be  the  sense  of 
asking  whether  drunkenness  would  still  be  wrong  if  it 
did  not  make  a  man  thick  in  his  speech,  unsteady  in 
his  gait,  erratic  in  his  conduct,  incoherent  in  his  thoughts, 
and  so  on.  Drunkenness  deprived  of  all  these  conse- 
quences would  not  be  drunkenness  at  all.  And  if  we 
are  to  consider  some  of  these  consequences,  why  not  all 
the  consequences  so  far  as  they  can  be  foreseen  ?  If 
the  drinking  of  alcohol  in  large  quantities  had  none  of 
these  effects,  it  would  be  as  innocent  as  water-drinking. 
In  a  rough-and-ready  way  we  can  of  course  distinguish 
between  the  consequences  which  do  and  those  which 
do  not  fall  within  our  conception  of  the  act.  But  that 
arises  merely  from  arbitrary  definitions  and  the  con- 
ventions of  language.  The  more  immediate  conse- 
quences are  commonly  included  m  the  conception  of 
an  act,  while  remote  consequences  are  excluded. 

How  purely  conventional  is  the  distinction  between  a 
rule  subject  to  exceptions  and  a  rule  which  has  no  excep- 
tions may  be  illustrated  by  the  difference  between  the 
case  of  lying  and  the  case  of  murder.  Morahsts  hke 
Kant  have  supposed  themselves  bound  to  condemn  all 
lying  because  there  is  no  general  consensus  that  legi- 
timate Hes — ^the  untruths  told  by  detectives  to  deceive 
criminals,  or  in  war  to  deceive  the  enem5^  or  by  the  sick 
man's  relative  to  save  his  life — are  not  Ues.  The  con- 
demnation of  murder  appears  to  have  no  exceptions 
because  there  is  an  estabhshed  convention  that  lawful 
killing  is  no  murder,  however  much  variety  of  opinion 
there  may  be  as  to  the  circumstances  which  remove 
killing  from  the  category  of  murder. 

If  to  drink  alcohol  to  the  point  of  stupefaction  once 
in  a  lifetime  were  found  to  be  an  effectual  prophylactic 
against  (say)  cancer,  small-pox,  and  typhoid-fever,  we 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  59 

should  still  perhaps  say  that  the  act  was  an  act  of 
drunkenness,  but  that  in  that  case  drunkenness  would 
be  right.  There  is  hardly  any  act  now  called  wrong 
about  which  we  might  not  theoretically  be  com- 
pelled to  reconsider  our  verdict  if  a  sufficiently 
revolutionary  discovery  were  made  as  to  its  ultimate 
consequences.  When  we  say,  as  we  often  quite  reason- 
ably do  say,  that  we  feel  such  an  act  would  always  be 
wrong  no  matter  what  its  consequences,  we  really  pre- 
suppose some  knowledge  of  the  actual  nature  of  things  ; 
we  often  do  know  sufficiently  for  practical  purposes 
that  no  good  consequences  could  actually  result  which 
would  be  sufficient  to  neutralize  the  bad  ones  which  we 
clearly  discern.  Nobody  can  rid  himself  of  much  know- 
ledge, derived  from  experience,  as  to  the  effects  of 
different  courses  of  action  sufficiently  to  pronounce  that 
completely  a  priori,  isolated  judgement  upon  the  right- 
ness  or  wrongness  of  an  act  which  the  thorough -going 
Intuitionist  declares  that  he  ought  to  pronounce  and  to 
regard  as  final  and  irreversible.  When  he  condemns 
human  sacrifice,  he  really  assumes  such  a  knowledge  of 
the  nature  of  things  as  makes  it  unreasonable  to  suppose 
that  the  sin  of  an  individual  or  a  nation  could  be 
expiated  or  the  consequences  of  divine  anger  deflected 
by  such  a  course.  No  sane  man  ever  does  really  pro- 
nounce upon  the  morality  of  an  act  in  entire  abstraction 
from  its  consequences,  and  when  once  it  is  admitted 
some  consequences  must  be  considered,  there  is  no 
logical  stopping  until  we  have  considered  all  the  conse- 
quences which  we  have  any  reason  to  believe  will  result 
from  the  act ;  though  the  necessities  of  practical  action 
constantly  require  us  to  decide  and  act  when  we  have 
satisfied  ourselves  that  the  nearer  consequences  are 
good,  and  have  no  reason  to  suspect  that  the  remoter 
ones  will  be  bad. 
The  more  the  attempt  to  distinguish  between  the  act 


60  ETHICS 

and  its  consequences  is  examined,  the  more  impracticable 
it  will,  I  believe,  be  found,  and  the  more  hopeless  the 
endeavour  to  pronounce  upon  the  morahty  of  the  act 
without  reference  to  such  foreseen  or  foreseeable  con- 
sequences. So  far  Intuitionism  must  be  regarded  as 
an  impossible  and  obsolete  mode  of  ethical  thought ; 
and  it  is  seldom  consistently  maintained  at  the  present 
day  even  by  those  who  show  more  or  less  hesitation  in 
actually  embracing  the  utilitarian  position  that  acts 
are  right  or  wrong  according  as  they  do  or  do  not  tend 
to  promote  the  greatest  quantity  of  good.  To  my  own 
mind  it  is  plain  that  so  far  the  Utihtarian  is  absolutely 
and  incontrovertibly  right.  But  this  doctrine  is,  as  has 
been  explained,  only  one  side  of  the  Utihtarian  system 
as  expounded  by  its  acknowledged  representatives,  by 
men  hke  Hume,  Bentham,  and  Mill.  The  other  side  of 
that  system  consists  in  the  doctrine  that  the  good  means 
simply  the  pleasant.  We  have  akeady  examined  the 
attempt  to  'prove  this  doctrine  by  the  theory  known  as 
psychological  Hedonism ;  but  we  have  also  seen  that, 
though  this  hedonistic  Psychology  is  false,  its  refutation 
does  not  necessarily  involve  the  abandonment  of  Hedo- 
nism, Though  we  can  desire  and  pursue  other  things 
besides  pleasure,  it  may  still  be  held  that,  if  we  do  so, 
we  are  fools  for  our  pains.  It  may  still  be  held  that 
pleasure  is  the  only  true  or  reasonable  or  right  object 
of  desire  or  end  of  action — that  pleasure  is  the  only 
good.  Now  this  doctrine  may  mean  one  of  two  things  ; 
it  may  mean  simply  that  good  and  pleasure  mean  the 
same  thing,  or  (what  is  much  the  same  position)  that 
there  is  no  real  meaning  or  validity  in  the  judgement 
that  one  end  ought  to  be  pursued  rather  than  another. 
This  view  I  have  attempted  to  combat  in  the  onty  way 
in  which  any  doctrine  about  ends  can  be  combated — by 
showing  that  it  does  not  correspond  with  the  facts  of 
consciousness.     We   do   use   the   words    "  good "    and 


THE   MORAL    CRITERION  CI 

"  right,"  and  attach  a  definite  meaning  to  them  ;  nor 
can  the  notions  which  they  imply  be  resolved  into  any 
simpler  or  more  ultimate  notions.  In  the  present 
chapter  I  have  further  attempted  to  show  that  to  pro- 
nounce an  act  rigid  means  at  bottom  to  say  that  it  is  a 
means  to  sometliing  which  we  recognize  as  good  or  (more 
strictly)  that  it  is  a  means  to  the  greatest  attainable 
good.  But  still  the  question  remains,  ''What  is  this 
good,  or  (if  the  good  consists  in  more  elements  than 
one)  what  ends  of  action  or  objects  of  desire  or  kinds 
of  consciousness  are  ultimately  good,  and  in  what  pro- 
portion do  they  contribute  to  the  ideal  or  supremely 
good  life  ?  "  Now  in  answer  to  that  question  it  is  still 
possible  for  an  objector  to  allege  that  nothing  presents 
itself  to  him  as  ultimately  good  except  pleasure  and 
pleasure  measured  quantitatively.  And  such  is  the 
jiosition  actually  adopted  in  the  most  defensible  form 
which  Hedonism  has  assumed  in  recent  times — the 
rationalistic  Hedonism  of  which  the  late  Professor  Henry 
Sidgwick  is  the  typical  representative.  It  will  be  well 
to  examine  this  system  a  little  further. 

So  long  as  we  are  asking  the  questions,  "  What  is  right, 
what  is  duty,  why  should  I  do  my  duty  ?  "  Professor 
Sidgwick  gives  substantially  the  answer  that  would  be 
given  by  the  Intuitionist.  He  frequently  adopts,  and 
identifies  himself  with,  the  language  of  stem  Apostles  of 
Duty  hke  Butler  or  Kant.  We  have,  he  recognizes,  an 
ultimate,  unanalysable  category  of  Duty  or  Right  which 
comes  from  our  Reason  ;  and,  on  reflection,  it  further  ) 
appears  that  it  is  right  or  reasonable  for  us  to  promote 
the  good  for  all  human  beings.  The  fact  that  it  is  my 
duty  is  a  sufficient  reason  for  doing  it ;  the  good  man  will 
do  his  duty  for  duty's  sake  or  (what  is  the  same  thing, 
in  other  words)  because  he  sees  that  it  is  reasonable  for 
him  to  do  so.  More  in  detail  there  are  three  precepts  which 
Sidgwick  recognizes   as  strictly   self-evident  axioms — 


62  ETHICS 

1.  That  I  ought  to  promote  my  own  greater  good 
rather  than  my  o^vn  lesser  good  (Axiom  of  Prudence). 

2.  That  I  ought  to  promote  the  greatest  good  on  the 
whole  (Axiom  of  Rational  Benevolence). 

3.  That,  in  the  distribution  of  good,  I  ought,  so  far  as 
my  action  can  secure  it,  to  regard  one  man's  good  as 
being  equally  valuable  ■with  the  hke  good  of  another  ac- 
cording to  the  Benthamite  maxim,  "  Everyone  to  count 
for  one,  nobody  for  more  than  one."     (Axiom  of  Equity.) 

But  when  he  goes  on  to  ask,  "  What  is  this  good  which 
I  ought  to  promote  and  to  distribute  equally  ?  "  Sidg- 
wick's  answer  is  the  old  Utilitarian  answer — "  The 
greatest  quantum  of  pleasure."  Are  we  prepared  to 
accept  this  view  as  to  the  ultimate  end  of  life.  If  not, 
what  can  we  say  against  it  ? 

1.  Now  in  the  first  place  it  should  be  observed  that 
in  the  system  of  Sidgwick  no  attempt  is  made  to  show 
that  the  doctrine  can  be  proved  by  the  hedonistic 
Psychology  or  any  other  facts  of  experience.  Frankly 
and  avowedly  the  system  rests  upon  an  intuition — as 
much  so  as  any  Anti- utilitarian  system  that  was  ever 
invented.  Sidgwick  fully  recognizes  that  the  proposi- 
tion "  Pleasure  is  good  "  is  as  much  an  a  priori  or  imme- 
diate judgement  as  the  proposition  "  Virtue  is  good  "  or 
"  Virtue  and  pleasure  are  both  good."  As  the  proposi- 
tion can  only  be  supported  by  an  appeal  to  an  ultimate 
judgement  of  our  Reason  or  moral  Consciousness,  so  in 
the  last  resort  it  can  only  be  refuted  by  showing  that 
it  does  not  really  correspond  to  the  actual  verdict  of 
our  Moral  Consciousness.  The  final  reason  for  denjdng 
that  pleasure  as  the  only  good  is  that  most  of  us  do  not 
really  think  so.  But  of  course  it  is  not  likely  that 
anyone  to  whom  Hedonism  commends  itself  as  plausible 
will  be  convinced  by  merely  setting  up  one  alleged 
"  intuition "  to  contradict  another  alleged  intuition. 
"  Questions  of  ultimate  ends,"  as  is  admitted  by  the 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  63 

Utilitarian  J.  S.  Mill,  ''  are  not  capable  of  proof  in  the 
ordinary  acceptation  of  the  term."  ^  But  what  we  can 
do  is  (a)  to  show  some  of  the  logical  difficulties  which 
are  involved  in  one's  opi:)onent's  position,  and  (b)  to 
contend  that  the  position  is  not  supported  by  that 
"  general  consensus  of  mankind  "  to  wliich  he  himself 
appeals  in  defence  of  it.     This  I  shall  proceed  to  do. 

2.  The  great  difficulty  of  all  Hedonism  which  pro- 
fesses to  support,  and  not  to  undermine,  the  ordinary 
notions  about  Duty  or  moral  obligation  is  to  find  a 
reason  why  I  should  promote  other  people's  pleasure 
rather  than  my  own  ;  except  of  course  in  so  far  as  my 
own  tastes  or  the  efficiency  of  the  police  or  the  like 
may  chance  to  bring  about  a  coincidence  between  my 
own  interest  and  that  of  the  general  pubHc.  Sidgwick  ^ 
contends  that  the  reason  for  my  doing  so  is  that  it 
seems  intrinsically  unreasonable  (or  wrong)  that  a 
smaller  amount  of  good  should  be  promoted  rather 
than  a  larger — no  matter  whether  that  good  be  mine  or 
another  person's.  Men  possess  a  Reason  which  tells 
them  that  not  to  do  so  would  be  unreasonable,  and 
some  of  them  are  endowed  with  a  "  desire  to  do  what 
is  right  and  reasonable  as  such,"  which  sometimes  in- 
duces them  actually  to  do  the  reasonable  thing  even 

^  Utilitarianism,  p.  .'52. 

2  I  pass  over  another  side  of  Professor  Sidgwick's  view — his 
admission  of  the  partial  rationality  of  Egoism,  involving  a 
"  Dualism  of  the  Practical  Reason,"  which,  he  thinks,  can  only  be 
removed  by  assuming  the  truth  of  theological  postulates,  i.e.  of 
God  and  Immortality.  It  can,  I  believe,  be  shown  that  all  Egoism 
(whether  the  good  be  conceived  of  as  Pleasure  or  anything  else) 
is  absolutely  and  irredeemably  irrational,  since  it  involves  a  con- 
tradiction. Good  means  "ought  to  be  pursued,"  and  Egoism 
makes  it  reasonable  for  me  to  assert  that  "  my  good  is  the  only 
thing  that  ought  to  be  pursued,"  while  it  pronounces  that  my 
neighbour  is  right  in  denying  that  proposition  and  in  asserting 
that  his  pleasure  is  the  only  thing  to  be  pursued.  Therefore  con- 
tradictory propositions  are  both  true.  But  I  must  not  further 
develope  this  point,  which  no  one  has  pushed  home  so  thoroughly 
as  Mr.  Moore  in  his  brilliant  Principia  Ethica,  pp.  99-103. 


64  ETHICS 

at  the  cost  of  their  own  good  {i.e.  pleasure)  rather  than 
the  unreasonable.  The  act  is  reasonable  and  right ; 
but  Sidgwick  will  not  say  that  such  conduct  is  in  itself 
good.  The  consequences  of  the  act  are  good,  i.e.  the 
other  people's  pleasure  which  is  promoted  ;  but  there 
is  nothing  good  or  intrinsically  valuable  in  the  act 
itself,  in  the  state  of  mind  from  which  it  results,  in  the 
desires  or  motives  which  inspire  it.  Moral  conduct,  in 
such  cases,  implies  absolute  self-sacrifice.  MoraHtj^  is, 
as  Thrasymachus  in  the  Repubhc  contended,  wholly 
and  entirely  "  another's  good  " — no  good  at  all  to  the 
agent.  Now  I  do  not  think  this  position  involves  any 
actual  logical  contradiction  ;  but  it  does  involve  what 
may  be  called  a  psj^chological  contradiction.  The  state 
of  mind  which  it  postulates  in  a  good  man  acting  (with 
full  reahsation  of  this  meaning)  upon  Sidgwickian  prin- 
ciples is  an  impossible  state  of  mind,  or  at  all  events 
one  so  rare  that  it  might  fairly  be  described  as  patho- 
logical. If  a  man  really  cares  about  being  reasonable, 
is  it  conceivable  that  he  should  at  the  bottom  of  his 
heart  believe  it  a  matter  of  no  importance  at  all  whether 
he  is  reasonable  or  not — ^that  he  should  think  it  an 
advantage  indeed  to  somebody  else,  but  a  matter  of 
no  importance  and  (if  it  involves  him  in  painful  conse- 
quences) a  dead  loss  to  himself  ?  If  he  reaUy  did  regard 
Morahty  or  character  or  goodness  as  a  completely  value- 
less asset,  would  he  any  longer  care  whether  his  conduct 
was  reasonable  or  not  ?  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  con- 
viction that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  duty,  that  one  kind 
of  conduct  is  intrinsically  reasonable  or  right  and 
another  kind  of  conduct  is  intrmsically  unreasonable  or 
WTong,  has  almost  invariably  gone  along  with  the  con- 
viction that  right  conduct,  or  the  character  or  disposition 
which  results  in  right  conduct,  is  in  and  for  itself  a  good 
and  the  greatest  of  goods.  The  strongest  conviction  of 
those  who  have  been  most  influenced  by  the  desire 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  65 

that  their  conduct  should  be  rational  or  right  has  been 
that  Virtue  is  "  its  own  exceeding  great  reward  " — not 
necessarily  its  only  reward,  but  that  it  is  really  worth 
having  in  and  for  itself. 

It  is  impossible  to  give  any  satisfactory  reason  for 
preferring  the  general  pleasure  to  one's  own  unless  we 
regard  Morality  as  an  end-in-itself ,  and  an  end  of  more 
value  than  pleasure.  And  if  it  is  an  end-in-itself  for 
me,  it  must  be  regarded  as  an  end-in-itself  for  others 
also.  We  shall  thus  have  to  include  moral  Well-being 
or  "  the  good  "will  "  in  our  conception  of  the  end  or 
good  which  it  is  the  duty  of  each  to  promote  for  all. 

Thus,  if  the  inner  logic  of  Sidgwick's  rationalistic 
Utihtarianism  be  followed  out,  it  will  be  found  to  have 
transformed  itself  into  a  system  which  may  perhaps 
still  be  called  Utilitarianism,  but  which  has  ceased  to  be 
Hedonism.  The  end  or  good  or  Well-being  the  ten- 
dency to  promote  which  will  mark  out  acts  as  right  or 
wrong,  will  no  longer  be  simple  pleasure,  but  goodness -f 
pleasure,  even  supposing  we  still  insist  that  goodness 
means  nothing  but  the  disposition  to  promote  pleasure 
— or  rather  pleasure  and  the  willingness  to  promote 
pleasure — for  others.  In  this  way,  no  doubt,  most 
of  the  practical  objections  to  Utilitarianism  will  be 
removed.  The  more  glaring  discrepancies  between 
logical  Utilitarianism  and  the  moral  ideal  recognized  by 
most  good  men  will  disappear.  The  most  obvious  of 
all  these  discrepancies  is  perhaps  to  be  found  in  the 
fact  that  the  ordinary  moral  consciousness  does  not 
treat  all  pleasure  as  exactly  on  a  level.  I  have  already 
pointed  out  that,  so  long  as  we  regard  pleasure  as  our 
only  end,  it  is  impossible  to  recognize  differences  in  the 
quality  of  pleasures,  which  are  not  ultimately  resolvable 
into  differences  of  quantit3\  It  is  otherwise  when  we 
regard  Morality  as  an  end-in-itself,  even  if  we  still 
regarded  Morality  as  consisting  in  nothing  but  Bene- 


66  ETHICS 

volence,  or  rather  Benevolence  guided  by  Justice.  For 
if  Goodness  in  the  sense  of  Altruism  be  regarded  as 
good  in  itself,  we  shall  be  able  to  recognize  the  superior 
value  of  those  pleasures  which  have  in  them  an  altruistic 
element.  We  shall  be  able  to  regard  the  pleasures 
which  actually  consist  in  or  include  the  exercise  of 
altruistic  emotions — the  pleasures  of  benevolence,  of 
family  affection,  of  friendship,  the  pleasures  which  con- 
sist in  any  form  of  useful  activity — as  superior  to 
merely  selfish  or  sensual  pleasures,  as  superior  in  them- 
selves and  not  merely  on  account  of  their  effects.  More- 
over, we  shall  be  able  to  a  considerable  extent  to  justify 
the  superiority  which  we  instinctively  accord  to  those 
pleasures  which  arise  from  the  exercise  of  our  higher 
faculties — intellectual,  sesthetic,  emotional — as  compared 
with  those  which  spring  from  the  mere  satisfaction  of 
bodily  appetites.  For  in  a  rough  and  general  way  it 
will  hardly  be  doubted  that  the  social  effects  of  such 
indulgence  are  better  than  those  which  result  from 
indulgence  in  sensual  pleasures.  The  artist,  the  man  of 
letters,  the  discoverer  do  benefit  the  world,  however 
little  as  individuals  they  may  be  directly  influenced  by 
philanthropic  motives.  Even  if  the  man  who  indulges 
in  such  pleasures  confines  himself  to  the  enjoyment  of 
what  others  produce,  the  cultivation  of  these  higher 
tastes  will  in  general  make  him  a  more  useful  and 
valuable  member  of  society  than  the  man  who  has  no 
pleasures  but  those  of  sport  or  athletics,  or  eating  and 
drinking.  At  the  very  least  he  will  be  much  less  Hkely 
to  indulge  in  pleasures  which  are  socially  pernicious. 
Even  the  most  selfish  dilettante  does  help  to  create  a 
demand  for  pictures,  books,  good  music,  and  the  hke, 
which  have  more  tendency  to  create  pleasure  for  others 
than  the  enjoyments  of  the  mere  sensuaUst.  Moreover, 
from  this  point  of  view  we  can  even  pronounce  some 
pleasures  to  be  bad — bad  in  themselves  and  not  merely 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  67 

for  their  external  effects — that  is  to  sa}',  any  pleasures 
which  actually  involve  the  gi%"ing  pain  to  others,  or 
which  are  inconsistent  \nth  that  cultivation  in  himself 
of  moral  character  which  we  have  agreed  to  recognize 
as  a  good  of  superior  value  to  pleasure.  And  we  may 
incidentally  remark  that  even  from  the  point  of  view 
which  we  have  now  reached,  we  can  see  a  reason  for 
condemning  suicide — at  least  in  the  vast  majority  of 
cases — in  a  way  which  was  impossible  so  long  as  we  re- 
garded pleasure  as  the  only  end  of  action.  If  goodness 
be  an  end  in  itself,  life  will  not  lose  all  its  value  the 
moment  it  has  ceased  to  yield  to  the  individual  a  net 
balance  of  pleasure  over  pain. 

8.  The  position  that  the  good  or  end  of  life  consists 
simply  in  these  two  elements — goodness  +  pleasure — is 
a  perfectly  possible  one.  It  was  quite  exphcitly  held,  for 
instance,  if  not  alwaj^s  consistently,  by  Kant.  It  is  not 
possible  to  urge  against  it  any  fundamental  objection 
from  the  point  of  view  of  logic  or  internal  consistency 
such  as  Ave  have  been  able  to  urge  against  the  attempt 
to  combine  the  view  that  pleasure  is  the  only  good  with 
a  recognition  of  the  duty  of  preferring  the  general 
pleasure  to  one's  own.  The  question  remains  whether, 
after  all,  this  is  the  real  verdict  of  our  moral  conscious- 
ness. To  begin  with,  let  us  look  once  more  at  the  ques- 
tion of  higher  and  lower  pleasures.  High-minded 
Hedonists  are  fond  of  arguing  that  the  preference  for 
higher  pleasures  can  be  justified  by  their  superior 
pleasantness  :  but  this  does  not  correspond  to  what  we 
really  feel  about  them.  Very  often,  I  tliink,  we  should 
recognize  that  the  lower  pleasure,  considered  merely  as  a 
pleasure.  Mould  be  the  more  mtense  ;  and  j^et  we  prefer, 
and  feel  that  it  is  reasonable  to  prefer,  the  higher.  The 
higher  pleasures  are  frequently  mixed  ^ith  a  good  deal  of 
pain — those  pleasures  of  symi^athy,  for  mstance,  upon 
the  value  of  which  amiable  Hedonists  are  so  fond  of  en- 


68  ETHICS 

larging,  or  the  pleasures  of  serious  study :  yet  we  feel 
that  they  are  worth  the  pain  ;  we  prefer  them,  or  at 
least  we  think  we  ought  to  prefer  them,  to  any  possible 
enlargement  or  prolongation  of  those  merely  sensual 
pleasures  in  which  there  is  no  element  of  pain  at  all.  We 
feel  that  no  possible  quantitative  accumulation  of  gas- 
tronomic delights  would  ever  be  regarded  as  a  satis- 
factory equivalent  for  the  total  loss  of  intellectual 
satisfaction.  Wlien  we  are  obHged  to  choose  between  a 
large  amount  of  a  lower  and  a  small  amount  of  a  higher 
pleasure,  we  may  no  doubt  think  that  a  very  large 
amount  of  the  lower  is  worth  more  than  a  very  small 
amoTint  of  the  higher.  Though  we  regard  the  pleasure 
of  reading  Shakespeare  as  a  more  valuable  thing  than 
the  freedom  from  toothache,  there  is  a  limit  to  the 
amount  of  toothache  which  we  should  think  it  reasonable 
to  submit  to  as  the  price  of  reading  the  best  hundred 
lines  that  Shakespeare  ever  wrote.  But,  though  we 
may  sometimes  think  it  reasonable  to  give  up  the  higher 
for  a  sufficient  amount  of  the  lower  pleasure — still  more 
often  to  save  a  sufficient  amount  of  pain — we  could 
never  say  that  any  quantity  of  the  lower  good  would 
render  it  a  matter  of  indifference  to  us  to  lose  the 
higher.  Yet  this  is  what  we  should  be  bound  to  say  if 
we  are  consistently  to  carry  out  Bentham's  famous  prin- 
ciple that,  "  quantity  of  pleasure  being  equal,  pushpin  is 
as  good  as  poetry."  On  this  view  it  would  always  be 
possible  to  state  the  exact  number  of  bottles  of  cham- 
pagne which  would  be  a  completely  satisfactory  equiva- 
lent for  the  pleasure  of  reading  Hamlet,  and  the  number 
of  bottles  for  the  sake  of  which  we  should  give  up  the 
pleasure  of  reading  the  finest  poem  in  the  world.  If 
we  do  not  think  so,  it  is  clear  that  we  are  not  indifferent 
to  the  source  from  which  our  pleasures  are  derived,  or 
the  kind  of  consciousness  which  we  find  pleasant.  We 
recognize  that  the  higher  experience  possesses  more  value 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  69 

than  the  lower,  though  it  does  not  necessarily  contain 
more  pleasure. 

It  may  be  that  pleasure  attends,  or  forms  an  element 
in,  all  the  states  of  consciousness  which  we  can  regard  as 
ultimately  good  :  but,  as  soon  as  a  man  says  :  "I  prefer 
the  higher  pleasure  though  I  don't  think  it  will  be  more 
pleasant  than  the  lower,"  it  is  clear  that  he  does  not 
think  pleasure  to  be  the  only  good.  When  he  prefers 
intellectual  pleasure  to  sensual,  he  is  really  preferring 
intellectual  activity  +  pleasure  to  pleasure  only.  We 
must,  indeed,  beware  of  supposing  that  these  two  ele- 
ments in  our  total  consciousness — the  pleasure  and  the 
intellectual  state  that  is  pleasant — can  really  be  sepa- 
rated, or  that  we  do  usuallj'  pronounce  a  judgement  upon 
the  value  of  the  one  apart  from  that  of  the  other.  Still,  it 
is  possible  to  attend  to  the  pleasantness  of  the  state 
apart  from  anything  else  about  it ;  and  that  is  what  the 
Hedonist  says  that  we  ought  always  to  do.  But  that  is 
just  what  ordinary  men  do  not  do,  and  do  not  think  it 
reasonable  to  do.  They  might,  indeed,  attach  much  less 
importance  to  the  intellectual  activity  if  it  were  divorced 
from  all  pleasure,  but  they  do  not  think  that  in  esti- 
mating the  value  of  such  pleasure  they  must  make 
abstraction  of  its  connection  with  intellectual  activity, 
or  that  a  certain  amount  of  the  pleasure  of  cricket  would 
be  of  exactly  equal  value.  They  pass  their  judgements 
of  value  upon  the  experience  or  mental  state  as  a  whole. 
They  do  not  regard  the  whole  value  of  the  state  as  con- 
sisting merely  in  the  amount  of  the  pleasure  :  and  that 
is  the  same  thing  as  to  say  that  they  do  regard  intel- 
lectual activity  as  a  good  in  itself. 

To  say  that  the  good  or  true  well-being  of  human  life 
consists  merely  in  these  two  sharply-distinguished 
elements,  Morahty-f  Pleasure,  is  then  a  quite  inadequate 
account  of  it.  If  we  are  asked  what  other  goods  we 
recognize  in  human  life,  the  most  important  element  is 


70  ETHICS 

no  doubt  that  enjoyment  of  intellectual  and  aesthetic  good 
which  we  have  just  been  considering.  But  there  is  no 
reason  for  limiting  our  conception  of  the  good  to  these 
three  elements — the  good-will,  intellectual  good,  plea- 
sure. Most  people  will  on  reflection  recognize  that  they 
assign  a  higher  value  to  various  kinds  of  affection  or 
social  emotion  quite  apart  from  the  fact  that  these 
emotions  do  in  general  stimulate  men  to  the  causing  of 
pleasure  in  others  ;  and  from  this  point  of  view  we  can 
condemn  many  customs  or  social  institutions  which 
might  possibly  result  in  an  increase  of  pleasure,  e.g.  the 
permission  of  infanticide,  the  elimination  of  the  old  and 
the  sick,  the  permission  of  unhmited  freedom  of  divorce. 
We  should  say  that  the  extinction  of  parental  and  family 
affection  involved  in  such  a  reconstruction  of  Societ}'  as 
Plato  recommends  in  his  ReiDubHc  would  lead  to  the 
decay  or  loss  of  very  valuable  elements  in  character  or 
conscious  experience.  We  may  even  (with  men  Uke 
Plato  and  Aristotle)  maintain  that  not  all  pleasure  is 
good,  and  we  need  not  condemn  the  pleasure  merely 
because  of  its  tendency  to  produce  a  loss  of  pleasure  in 
other  directions  :  we  can  condemn  not  merely  the  plea- 
sures of  cruelty  but  those  of  lust,  i.e.  those  resulting  from 
the  gratification  of  the  sexual  impulse  except  m  a  way 
that  is  duly  subordinated  to  the  higher  and  more  spiritual 
ends  promoted  by  monogamous  and  relatively  permanent 
marriage.i  We  are  able  to  condemn  drimkenness  and 
other  kinds  of  intemperance  "odthout  proving  that  the 
pleasure  of  an  occasional  drinking-bout  is  necessarily 
outweighed  by  the  resulting  headache  or  loss  of  health. 
It  must  be  mentioned  that  in  treating  the  total  good 
of  human  life  as  made  up  of  different  elements,  we  are 

1  By  this  I  mean  marriage  intended  by  the  parties  to  be  per- 
manent and  not  to  be  dissolved  excejDt  for  grave  reasons.  I  do 
not  mean  that  divorce  and  re-marriage  may  not  sometimes  be  the 
less  of  two  evils. 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  71 

looking  upon  the  matter  in  a  very  abstract  way.  We 
cannot  regard  the  ideal  Hfe  of  man  as  made  up  simply  of 
the  juxtaposition  of  so  many  goods,  as  though  each  were 
to  be  enjoyed  separately  and  independently.  The  ideal 
life  is  not  one  in  which  five-eighths  of  a  man's  waking 
hours  are  devoted  to  Morality,  one-fourth  to  pleasure, 
and  the  remaining  one-eighth  to  pleasure.  The  claims  of 
MoraUty  extend  over  the  whole  life ;  but  in  the  course  of 
doing  his  duty  a  man  is  or  may  be  exercising  his  highest 
intellectual  faculties,  and  at  the  same  time  getting  the 
pleasure  which  results  from  such  exercise.  It  is  only  in 
the  comparativelj'-  rare  case  of  collision  between  the 
higher  good  and  the  lower  that  it  becomes  necessary  to 
choose  between  them.  In  the  abstract  we  may  sa}^  that 
it  is  always  a  man's  duty  to  prefer  for  himself  and  for 
others  the  higher  good  to  a  much  larger  amount  of  the 
lower ;  but  the  good  of  human  life  does  not  consist 
merely  in  the  higher  good  without  the  lower.  A  hfe  of 
virtue  combined  with  complete  stupidity  or  continuous 
toothache  would  not  be  the  ideal  life  for  man,  though  it 
might  be  much  better  than  a  life  of  perfectly  selfish 
culture  or  of  successful  pleasure-seekmg.  Our  moral 
judgements  relate  quite  as  much  to  the  determination  of 
the  proper  proportion  between  the  dift'erent  elements  in 
human  life  as  to  the  abstract  preference  of  one  good  to 
another.  To  arrive  at  a  perfectly  truthful  moral  judge- 
ment as  to  the  rightness  or  ^vTong■ness  of  particular  acts, 
we  should  form  a  conception  of  human  life  as  a  whole, 
and  then  ask  what  mode  of  action  in  any  given  circum- 
stance will  promote  that  true  good. 

The  method  of  Ethics  which  attempts  to  determine  the 
MoraUty  of  acts  by  their  tendency  to  promote  such  an 
ideal  good  may  be  called  Ideal  Utihtarianism.  Such  a 
method  -v^-ill  agree  with  Utilitarianism  in  judging  of  the 
morality  of  actions  by  their  tendency  to  promote  a  maxi- 
mum of  good  on  the  whole  ;  it  will  differ  from  ordinary 


72  ETHICS 

hedonistic  Utilitarianism  in  recognizing  that  this  good  is 
an  ideal  good  made  up  of  many  elements  which  possess 
different  values,  but  each  of  which  ought  to  exist  and  to 
bear  a  certain  proportion  to  the  others  in  the  best  human 
life.  It  has  been  assumed  throughout  that  in  this  hier- 
archy of  gooda  Morahty  or  goodness  is  always  to  be  re- 
garded as  supreme  :  the  other  goods  will  be  promoted 
exactly  in  so  far  as  the  Moral  Reason  itself  dictates. 
Although  Morahty  is  not  the  only  element  of  value  in 
human  good,  a  man  can  never  be  required  by  the  prin- 
ciple here  defended  to  make  any  sacrifice  of  this  highest 
good  for  the  sake  of  any  of  the  lower  goods  ;  for  if ,  when 
he  is  for  the  moment  choosing  some  lower  good,  he  is 
only  assigning  to  it  its  true  value  and  no  more,  he  will 
only  be  doing  his  duty,  and  so  his  conduct  could  not 
possibly  involve  any  sacrifice  of  moral  goodness. 

But  at  this  point  a  difficulty  may  be  apt  to  suggest 
itself.  Is  a  man,  it  may  be  said,  always  morally  bound 
to  do  what  will  promote  the  maximum  of  good  on  the 
whole  at  the  cost  of  any  amount  of  his  own  lower  good  ? 
Is  the  question,  "  What  shall  I  do  "  always  a  question  of 
absolute  right  or  absolute  wrong  ?  Or  is  the  alternative 
sometimes  simply  the  choice  between  a  higher  and  a 
lower  ?  Granted  that  a  man  cannot  morally  do  less 
than  his  duty,  may  he  not  sometimes  do  more  ?  Granted 
that  every  man  is  bound  to  be  benevolent,  is  every  one 
bound  to  make  every  conceivable  sacrifice  which  would 
result  in  a  net  good  for  society  greater  than  the  good 
which  he  would  lose  ?  Are  there  not  some  acts  which  it 
is  good  to  do  but  not  wrong  for  a  man  to  leave  undone  ? 
This  is  theoretically  one  of  the  most  difficult  questions 
of  Ethics,  and  practically  one  of  the  most  important. 
It  is  the  question  which  by  Theologians  is  expressed  in 
the  form,  "  Can  there  be  such  a  thing  as  works  of  super- 
erogation ?  "  It  is  impossible  here  to  discuss  it  as  it  de- 
serves, and  I  can  only  give  briefly  what  seems  to  me  the 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  78 

true  solution  of  it.  A  man  can  never  be  justified  in  doing 
less  than  his  duty,  but  one  man's  duty  may  be  higher  than 
another's.  Here  it  becomes  necessary  to  bear  in  mind 
what  we  may  call  the  great  utilitarian  principle  of  the 
'■  long-run  " — that  principle  of  the  necessity  for  general 
rules  on  which  writers  hke  Hume  have  insisted  so  much. 
In  determining  what  it  is  right  to  do,  we  have  to  consider 
not  merely  the  effect  of  the  particular  act,  but  the  ulti- 
mate effects  of  making  the  principle  on  which  we  act  into 
a  general  rule  of  conduct.  Now  when  we  look  upon  the 
matter  in  this  light,  we  shall  easily  recognize  that  the 
different  capacities  of  different  men  and  the  complex 
needs  of  human  society  make  it  desirable  that  great 
sacrifices  for  the  good  of  humanity  should  at  times  be 
made  by  some,  but  not  imposed  upon  all.  ^Vhile,  there- 
fore, some  rules  of  conduct  are  binding  upon  all  (since 
this  universal  observance  is  required  in  the  intereste  of 
Society),  there  are  other  cases  when  it  is  reasonable  to 
sanction  both  a  higher  and  lower' kind  of  life,  when  we 
can  say  that  one  course  of  conduct  is  the  highest,  though 
it  is  not  wrong  to  adopt  the  lower.  There  are.  in  other 
words,  differences  of  moral  vocation  ;  but  this  Uberty  of 
choice  must  be  qualified  by  the  duty  of  choosing  one's 
vocation  rightly.  Vocation  is  determined  partly  by  a 
man's  external  circumstances  and  the  needs  of  human 
society,  partly  by  his  own  moral  and  intellectual  capa- 
cities. A  man  must  always  do  his  duty  and  can  never 
without  sin  do  less  ;  but  the  duty  of  some  men  is  higher 
and  more  exacting  than  that  of  others.  Such  an  answer 
to  the  problem  is  at  all  events  in  accordance  with  common 
sense  moral  ideas.  We  recognize  it  as  a  duty  for  all  men 
to  speak  the  truth  and  to  do  some  form  of  useful  work. 
We  recognize  it  as  a  good  thing  for  some  men  to  become 
self-sacrificing  apostles,  missionaries  of  a  rehgious  faith 
or  of  social  reform  or  of  many  another  great  cause  ;  but 
we  do  not  recognize  this  as  a  duty  for  all  men.     Yet  we 


74  ETHICS 

should  insist  that  if  a  man  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
he,  being  what  he  actually  is,  could  be  more  useful  to 
Society  by  being  a  missionary,  and  felt  in  himself  the 
capacity  of  such  a  life  of  self-sacrifice,  it  would  be  a 
failure  in  duty  for  him  to  refuse  what  would  thus  present 
itself  to  him  as  a  call  ^  to  be  a  IMissionary.  Sometimes 
the  very  existence  of  a  strong  natural  desire  that  a  par- 
ticular kind  of  work  should  be  done  may  make  it  a  duty 
for  a  man  to  devote  himself  to  it.  For  a  man  who, 
though  he  might  desire  the  spread  of  true  rehgious  ideas 
among  the  less  enlightened  race  of  mankind,  was  more 
naturally  interested  in  the  advance  of  knowledge,  it 
might  be  a  duty  to  devote  himself  to  the  advance  of 
knowledge  ;  and  yet  it  may  be  admitted  that  the  more 
self-sacrificmg  mode  of  life  is  intrinsically  and  ab- 
stractedly the  higher  and  nobler,  and  further  we  may 
add  that  it  is  often  a  man's  duty  to  aim  at  acquiring 
a  capacity  for  higher  services  and  more  strenuous  sacri- 
fice than  that  of  which  he  at  present  feels  himself 
capable.  A  man  can  never  do  more  than  his  duty,  but 
it  is  sometimes  one  man's  duty  to  do  and  to  suffer  more 
than  another's  duty  demands  of  him. 

It  will  now  be  seen  that  our  criterion  of  Utilitarianism 
in  its  rationalistic  form  has  brought  us  round  to  the 
admission  of  much  that  was  contended  for  by  the  typical 
Intuitionist.  We  have  accepted  his  fundamental  prin- 
ciple that  a  man's  duty  is  something  which  has  to  be 
intuitively  perceived.  We  have  insisted  upon  the  doc- 
trine upon  which  Intuitionists  have  usually  laid  the 
greatest  stress — the  doctrine  that  IMorahty  or  good  char- 
acter is  an  end-in-itself,  the  most  important  of  all  ends, 
the  greatest  of  all  goods.     But  there  is  a  fundamental 

1  The  word  of  course  suggests  the  religious  conception  that 
God  is  calling  him  to  the  particular  task.  It  will  be  unnecessary 
to  discuss  here  how  far  some  men  may  have  any  more  immediate 
consciousness  of  such  a  call  than  is  implied  in  the  consciousness 
that  it  is  his  duty  so  to  act. 


THE    MORAL    CRITERION  75 

difference  between  our  intuitions  and  the  intuitions  of  the 
Intuitionist,  The  tjqiical  Intuitionist  professes  to  de- 
termine by  quasi -instinctive  or  a  priori  judgement  the 
rightness  or  wrongness  of  an  act  without  knowing  any, 
or  at  least  without;  knowing  all,  of  its  consequences.  Such 
a  method  of  ethical  judgement  we  have  rejected  as  iiTa- 
tional,  since  it  practically  amounts  to  pronouncing  an 
act  right  or  wrong  Avithout  knowing  what  in  fact  the  act 
really  is  :  the  act  is  the  whole  sum  of  effects  resulting 
from  a  given  volition,  so  far  as  they  are  or  could  be  fore- 
seen by  the  agent.  Our  intuitions  relate  not  to  isolated 
acts  or  isolated  rules  of  action,  but  to  ends— to  the  in- 
trinsic value  of  different  kinds  of  consciousness.  We 
must,  indeed,  know  from  experience  Avhat  an  end  is  before 
we  can  pronounce  it  good  or  bad  ;  we  cannot  pronounce 
knowledge  better  than  pleasure  or  pleasure  better  than 
pain  without  knowing  what  in  fact  knowledge  and  plea- 
sure and  pain  in  general,  or  such  and  such  particular 
pleasures,  actually  are  ;  and  this  we  can  only  know  from 
experience  ;  and  we  are  dependent  upon  experience  for 
our  knowledge  as  to  the  consequences  likely  to  result 
from  such  and  such  conduct.  But  when  we  come  to  ask 
what  is  the  intrinsic  and  the  relative  value  of  such  and 
such  a  state  of  consciousness,  experience  can  tell  us 
nothing.  Yet  we  do,  all  of  us,  pronounce  these  judge- 
ments. The  moral  judgement  has  turned  out  to  be  in  the 
last  resort  a  judgement  of  value.  The  intuitions  of  the 
Intuitionist  related  to  isolated  acts  ;  ours  relate  to  goods 
or  ends.  His  are  expressed  m  the  form,  "  This  is  right  "  ; 
ours  assume  the  form,  "  This  is  good."  Such  a  position, 
be  it  observed,  involves  no  surrender  of  the  ultimate, 
imanalysable  character  of  the  idea  of  "rightness," 
"  oughtness  "  or  "  duty."  For  the  good  or  valuable 
means  "  what  ought  to  be  so  far  as  it  can  be  "  ;  in  the 
judgement  that  an  end  is  good  it  is  imphed  that,  if  by  any 
voluntary  act  of  mine  it  can  be  promoted,  I  ought  to  do 


76  ETHICS 

that  act.  The  good  and  the  right  are  correlative  terms. 
We  cannot  fully  think  out  the  meaning  of  the  one  with- 
out understanding  the  meaning  of  the  other,  just  as 
the  convex  implies  a  concave,  and  the  notion  of  father 
involves  that  of  son. 

We  have  assumed  so  far  that  in  estimating  the  right- 
ness  of  actions  we  are  concerned  only  with  human  good. 
But  if  pleasure  be  allowed  to  be  a  good  and  pain  to  be  an 
evil,  why  are  the  pains  and  pleasures  of  the  animals  to  be 
left  out  of  the  calculation  ?  It  must,  I  think,  be  ad- 
mitted that  in  strictness  they  ought  to  be  included. 
We  should  have  no  reason  for  condemning  cruelty  to 
animals  unless  we  do  regard  the  animal's  pleasure  as  a 
good  and  its  pain  as  an  evil.  And  that  verdict,  I  beheve, 
the  developed  moral  consciousness  actually  accepts. 
But  the  good  of  which  the  animals  are  capable  is  a  good 
of  a  comparatively  lower  order.  We  can  hardly  attribute 
to  them  any  good  but  pleasure,  and  the  more  animal 
kind  of  affection  would  seem  to  be  their  highest  plea- 
sure ;  while  it  is  but  rarely  that  we  can  really  promote 
the  good  of  the  animals  in  any  positive  way,  as  distinct 
from  not  causing  them  pain,  without  a  disproportionate 
diminution  of  the  higher  human  good.  And  therefore 
it  is  but  seldom  that  we  need  take  into  account  the 
effect  of  our  conduct  upon  animal  well-bemg.  The  duty 
of  humanity  towards  animals  should  be  insisted  upon  in 
its  proper  place  ;  but  it  seems  unnecessary  to  cumber 
our  statement  about  the  criterion  of  human  conduct  by 
adding  to  every  proposition  about  the  duty  of  promoting 
true  human  well-being  the  rider  "  and  the  well-being  of 
the  lower  animals  in  so  far  as  they  are  capable  of  it  and 
in  proportion  to  its  value." 

The  position  at  which  we  have  arrived  may  be  briefly 
summed  up  as  follows  : 

1.  Intuitionism  is  right  in  maintaining  the  ultimate 
unanalysable  character  of  the  ideas  implied  in  our  moral 


THE  MORAL  CRITERION  77 

judgements — the  ideas  right  and  wrong,  good  and  evil, 
and  consequently  the  intuitive  or  immediate  character 
of  our  ultimcite  moral  judgements.  It  is  right  in  the 
supreme  value  which  it  has  usually  assigned  to  moral 
goodness,  and  its  refusal  to  measure  the  value  of  other 
elements  in  consciousness  by  the  mere  quantity  of 
pleasure  involved  in  them.  It  is  wrong  in  its  attempt 
to  determine  the  rightness  or  wrongness  of  isolated  acts 
or  isolated  rules  of  conduct  without  reference  to  their 
effects  upon  human  life  as  a  whole. 

2.  Utihtarianism  is  right  in  insisting  that  the  true 
criterion  of  Morality  is  the  tendency  of  an  act  to  produce 
the  maximum  of  human  Well-being.  It  is  wrong  in 
identifying  the  good  with  pleasure,  though  right  in  re- 
garding pleasure  as  a  good  and  an  element  in  the  good. 

3.  These  two  complementary  aspects  of  ethical  truth 
may  be  brought  together  by  recognizing  that  (a)  the  very 
principles  upon  which  a  rational  Utihtarianism  is  founded 
are  themselves  intuitive  truths,  i.e.  the  rules  of  Rational 
Benevolence  and  Equity  ;  and  (6)  that  all  other  intui- 
tions are  really  judgements  of  value,  i.e.  judgements  as  to 
the  ultimate  value  of  different  states  of  consciousness. 
In  ultimate  analysis  all  moral  judgements  may  be  re- 
duced to  such  judgements  of  value  ;  for  when  once  it  is 
settled  what  mode  of  consciousness  is  valuable,  it  follows 
(upon  the  assumption  that  the  good  has  quantity)  that 
a  larger  amomit  of  it  must  always  be  preferable  to  a 
smaller,  and  that  one  man's  good  must  be  of  equal 
intrinsic  value  with  the  like  good  ^  of  every  other  man. 

^  This  qualification  was  not  recognized  by  Bentham,  and  indeed 
could  not  be  recognized  by  one  who  thought  that  pleasure  measured 
quantitatively  was  the  only  good.  If  this  qualification  be  ignored, 
we  should  have  no  reason  for  preferring  a  man's  good  to  an 
animal's,  except  upon  the  very  doubtful  assumption  that  a  man's 
pleasures  are  usually  pleasanter  to  him  than  a  pig's  pleasures  are 
to  the  pig.     Sidgwick  has  also  failed  to  make  this  distinction. 


78  ETHICS 

CHAPTER   V 

MORALITY   AND    RELIGION 

We  have  so  far  treated  the  Science  of  Ethics  as  if  it 
were  an  independent  Science  which  could  be  treated  in 
complete  abstraction  from  all  other  questions  as  to  the 
ultimate  nature  of  the  Universe.  We  have  simply- 
examined  the  nature  and  contents  of  our  moral  Con- 
sciousness without  making  any  preliminary  assumption 
as  to  the  nature  of  the  Universe  at  large  or  as  to  man's 
place  in  that  Universe,  and  without,  on  the  other  hand, 
asking  what  light  is  thrown  by  the  facts  of  the  Moral 
Consciousness  upon  these  wider  problems.  But,  for 
reasons  which  were  indicated  in  our  mtroductory  chapter, 
it  is  impossible  to  treat  ethical  questions  fully  and  satis- 
factorily mthout  findmg  ourselves  mvolved  in  these 
further  questions.  A  very  brief  attempt  must  now  be 
made  to  deal  with  the  relation  of  Ethics  to  our  general 
theory  of  the  Universe — that  is  to  say,  practically,  to 
Metaphysics,  to  Theology,  and  to  Religion. 

In  the  present  chaos  of  opinion  upon  such  ultimate 
questions  it  is  not  surprismg  that  many  persons  of  much 
practical  earnestness  should  make  the  attempt  to  put 
Ethics  upon  a  basis  which  shall  be  quite  mdependent  of 
all  metaphysical  or  theological  opinions.  The  "  inde- 
pendence of  Ethics  "  is  a  favourite  watchword  with 
those  who  in  practical  life  wish  to  substitute  "  ethical 
culture  "  for  Religion,  ethical  teaching  for  rehgious  edu- 
cation, ethical  societies  for  Churches.  Now  this  inde- 
pendence may  be  asserted  in  two  senses  which  should 
be  carefully  distmguished.  So  long  as  the  phrase  merely 
imphes  that  our  ethical  judgements  are  not  m  any  sense 
deductions  or  inferences  from  some  previously  accepted 
view  of  the  Universe,  and  that  the  words  "  right  "  and 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  79 

"  -wTong  "  have  a  distinct  meaning  which  does  not  involve 
any  immediate  reference  to  the  idea  of  God  or  to  any 
other  metaphysical  creed,  we  are  undoubtedly  right  in 
speaking  of  the  "  independence  of  ethics."  The  notion 
that  right  and  wrong  mean  simply  what  is  in  accordance 
with  the  will  of  God  (considered  merely  as  a  powerful 
Being  who  has  threatened  to  reward  certain  actions  and 
to  punish  others)  is  one  which  has  seldom  been  main- 
tained by  Christian  Theologians  except  during  a  few 
very  short  periods  of  theological  degeneracy.  Such  a 
view  reduces  to  absolute  meaninglessness  the  funda- 
mental Christian  idea  that  God  is  intrinsically  good  and 
lo\-ing.  Nor  is  there  in  the  bare  consciousness,  of  duty 
any  necessary  reference  to  any  form  of  expected  reward 
or  punishment  in  this  life  or  any  other.  The  ideas  of 
right  and  wrong,  or  good  and  evil,  are  found  in  the 
adherents  of  the  most  diverse  reUgions,  in  people  who 
have  never  embraced  a  religious  creed  or  ha^^  deUbe- 
rately  abandoned  one,  in  people  of  all  metaphysical 
views,  and  in  people  who  have  not  consciously  and 
explicitly  accepted  any  particular  theory,  positive  or 
negative,  as  to  the  ultimate  nature  of  things.  Such 
persons  have  the  notion  of  right  and  WTong  in  general, 
more  or  less  fully  developed,  in  their  minds ;  they  act 
upon  such  ideas,  or  they  condemn  themselves  when  they 
do  not  :  and,  though  it  cannot  be  said  that  men's 
notions  of  what  particular  acts  are  right  or  -oTong  are 
unaffected  by  their  religious  beUefs  or  disbeUefs,  their 
actual  moral  code  tends  to  be  more  and  more  nearly 
identical  as  they  approach  the  liigher  levels  of  moral  and 
spiritual  experience.  All  this  has  been  assumed,  and 
even  strongly  asserted,  thi'oughout  this  work. 

But  that  is  a  very  different  thing  from  asserting  that 
a  constructive  ethical  creed — an  ethical  creed  which 
asserts  the  validity  of  moral  obligation — can  be  com- 
bined with  any  and  every  possible  metaphysical  theory. 


80  ETHICS 

There  are  many  metaphysical  views  which  are  quite 
inconsistent  with  the  idea  of  moral  obligation,  although 
those  who  hold  them  may  not  always  be  aware  of  the 
fact.  Some  men  are  logically  precluded  from  asserting 
the  idea  of  moral  obligation  by  their  theory  of  know- 
ledge. Some  philosophers,  for  instance,  have  supposed 
that  all  knowledge  is  derived  from  sensible  experience  ; 
the  idea  of  moral  obligation  clearly  cannot  be  so  derived, 
for  no  amount  of  experience  as  to  what  is  can  prove  an 
ottgJU.  Hence  upon  this  hypothesis  the  idea  of  "  ought " 
must  be  pronounced  to  be  a  mere  delusion  ;  and  when 
s^isation  is  made  into  the  sole  ground  of  knowledge 
it  is  difficult  to  discover  any  standard  for  the  value  of 
mere  sensation  except  its  pleasurableness.  Sensation- 
alism has  always  therefore  shown  a  tendency  to  ally 
itself  with  Hedonism.  Still  less  is  a  constructive  theory 
of  Ethics  open  to  those  who  follow  out  a  sensationalistic 
theory  of  knowledge  to  its  logical  consequences,  and 
avowedly  admit  that  we  have  no  reasonable  ground  for 
asserting  our  beUef  in  anything  beyond  the  sensation  of 
the  moment.  An  Ethic  which  gives  a  real  meaning  to 
the  idea  of  duty  must,  therefore,  postulate  a  theory  of 
knowledge  which  admits  of  the  validity  of  intellectual 
concepts  or  categories  which  are  not  merely  sensations 
or  derived  from  mere  sensation.  Or,  if  we  turn  from 
theories  of  knowledge  to  theories  of  Being  (Ontology,  or 
Metaphysic  in  the  narrower  sense),  it  is  clear  that  some 
theories  of  the  Universe  necessarily  involve  the  denial 
of  all  vahdity  to  our  moral  judgements  when  these  are 
considered  as  statements  of  actual  objective  fact,  and  not 
merely  of  certain  imaginings  which  actually  have  a  kind 
of  existence  in  the  minds  of  some  human  beings. 
Materiahstic  Automatism,  for  instance,  asserts  that  all 
psychical  events  are  caused  Avholly  and  entirely  by 
physical  events — that  no  thought,  emotion,  vohtion  of 
mine    can    ever    cause   another    thought,    emotion   or 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  81 

volition,  still  less  an  event  in  the  physical  world.  Such  a 
view  contradicts  all  that  is  implied  in  asserting  that  it 
is  right  for  us  to  act  in  a  certain  way.  The  belief  in 
right  and  wrong  does  imply  that  I  am  the  real  cause  of 
my  own  acts,  that  the  acts  will  be  good  or  bad  according 
as  I  am  good  or  bad,  according  as  I  do  or  do  not  deter- 
mine my  acts  by  reference  to  a  certain  ideal  of  Duty. 
According  to  the  materiaUstic  view  just  indicated,  such  a 
notion  must  be  set  do^^ii  as  a  pure  delusion.  My  con- 
sciousness— mj'-  consciousness  say,  of  a  duty  to  get  up 
in  the  morning — is  a  mere  "  epiphenomenon  "  or  bj'- 
product  of  a  physical  process  which  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  subsequent  psychical  event  which  I  call  a 
volition  to  get  up — still  less  with  the  actual  motions  of 
my  body  which  are  commonly  supposed  to  result  from 
this  volition.  The  vahdity  of  our  moral  notions  then 
absolutely  presupposes  ( 1 )  the  existence  of  a  permanent 
spiritual  self  ;  (2)  that  human  acts  are  really  caused  by 
such  a  self.  In  this  sense  Freedom  is  an  absolutely 
neces!?ary  postulate  of  Morality. 

It  would  lead  us  too  far  away  from  our  main  subject 
to  discuss  the  further  problem  whether  each  act  of  the 
self  is  determined  by  the  original  character  of  that  self 
(itself  caused  by  the  character  of  its  ancestors  and 
ultimately  by  the  nature  of  the  Universe)  together  with 
the  influence  exercised  upon  it  by  its  environment  from 
the  moment  of  birth  to  the  moment  of  the  act,  or  whether 
each  particular  act  (when  and  in  so  far  as  it  is  free) 
constitutes  an  absolutely  new  beginning  imcomiected 
by  any  causal  law  with  anything  that  is  already  in  exist- 
ence. I  must  be  content  with  saying  that  there  are, 
to  my  mind,  insuperable  difficulties  to  this  ''  indeter- 
ministic  "  theory  of  Free-will.  It  involves  the  behef 
that  events  may  happen  without  a  cause  ;  and  so  far 
from  being  necessary  to  Morality,  it  destroys  the  whole 
conception  of  moral  responsibihty.     If  my  character  is 


82  ETHICS 

not  the  cause  of  my  good  and  bad  actions,  why  should  I 
be  praised  or  blamed  for  them  ?  What  is  necessary  to 
the  belief  in  moral  obligation  is  that  my  character 
should  be  regarded  as  the  real  cause  of  my  acts.  This 
view  of  the  Free-will  problem  may  be  called  the  theory 
of  Self-determination,  and  the  denial  of  Free-will  in  this 
sense  implies  the  denial  of  all  validity  to  the  fundamental 
conceptions  of  the  moral  consciousness.  Freedom  in 
this  sense  may  be  regarded  as  an  absolutely  necessary 
postulate  of  Morality.  This,  of  course,  does  not  require 
us  to  deny  the  obvious  fact  that  some  men  who  have 
doubted  or  denied- this  postulate  may  practically  or  even 
theoretically  recognize  and  act  upon  the  idea  of  duty. 
The  capacities  for  inconsistency  in  the  human  mind  are 
almost  unHmited. 

Certain  beUefs  about  the  nature  of  knowledge  and  of 
the  human  self  are  thus  necessary  imphcations  of  a  beUef 
in  vahd  moral  judgements,  for  those  who  think  those 
implications  out ;  and  beUefs  of  this  kind  carry  mth 
them  a  good  many  consequences  for  our  general  theory 
of  the  Universe.  A  man  who  believes  m  a  Universe 
which  includes  selves  capable  of  being  directed  by  an 
ideal  of  duty  and  of  translating  this  beUef  into  action 
is  not,  strictly  speaking,  a  Materiahst.  Does  the  behef 
in  Moral  Obhgation  necessarily  imply  anjiihmg  further 
about  the  Universe  ?  Can  a  man  logically  beheve  in 
Moral  Obligation,  for  instance,  who  thinks  that  the 
Universe,  though  it  has  somehow  in  the  course  of  ages 
deUvered  itself  of  these  spiritual  autonomous  selves,  was 
originally  a  purely  material,  unconscious,  mindless  Uni- 
verse, guided  by  no  intelhgence,  directed  towards  no 
end  or  purpose,  perhaps  an  Universe  m  which  there  is 
more  evil  than  good  ?  In  other  w^ords,  is  Theism,  or 
any  other  form  of  what  is  commonly  called  religious 
behef,  necessary  to  Morahty  ?  I  do  not  think  a  per- 
fectly definite  "  yes  "  or  "  no  "  can  be  given  to  this 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  83 

enquiry.  On  the  one  hand,  it  does  not  appear  to  me 
that  a  denial  of  God's  existence  necessarily  deprives  the 
idea  of  Moral  Obligation  of  all  meaning,  as  we  have  seen 
to  be  the  case  with  the  disbelief  in  the  autonomous  self. 
A  man  who  denies  or  doubts  the  existence  of  God  may 
still  attach  a  clear  and  definite  meaning  to  the  idea  of 
dut}',  and  he  is  logically  entitled  to  claim  a  certain 
objectivity  for  it,  inasmuch  as  it  is  a  part  not  only  of 
his  thinking,  but  of  all  human  thinking  ;  but  I  do  not 
beheve  that  for  such  a  person  our  moral  judgements  can 
carry  with  them  the  same  kind  of  objectivity  that  they 
do  for  the  Theist.  I  do  not  think  they  can  carry  with 
them  all  that  is  implied  in  the  objecti\'ity  which  the 
Moral  Consciousness  claims  for  itself.  Our  belief  in  the 
validity  of  our  moral  ideas  seems  at  bottom  to  imply 
that  the  moral  law  must  be  on  a  level  in  point  of  objec- 
tivity with  the  physical  laws  of  nature — that  they  are 
somehow  laws  of  the  Universe,  expressions  of  the  ulti- 
mate nature  of  things,  not  merely  Mays  of  thinking 
which  happen  to  have  been  evolved  in  a  particular  human 
brain,  or  even  in  the  normal  human  brain,  at  a  certain 
stage  of  its  development.  This  was  one  of  the  things, 
no  doubt,  which  Plato  meant  to  assert  by  his  "  Idea  of 
the  Good  "  ;  he  meant  that,  if  moral  obligation  is  to  be 
treated  as  in  the  fullest  sense  a  valid  concept,  the  true 
moral  ideal  must  be  derived  from  the  same  source  as  all 
other  EeaUty.  How  far  could  this  be  the  case  in  a 
Universe  which  was  essentially  (so  to  speak)  mindless, 
but  had  merely  happened  to  deliver  itself  of  minds  in 
which  a  moral  ideal  was  found  ?  The  physical  la\\s  of 
nature,  on  any  metaphysical  theory,  do  possess  a  certain 
objectivitj'- ;  they  express  something  ^hich  the  Universe 
really  is,  or  does,  whether  any  particular  individual 
thinks  so  or  not.  But  could  mc,  upon  the  vie^-  sug- 
gested, say  the  same  of  the  moral  law  ?  Human  ideas 
about  Morality  differ  ;    nor  can  any  one  human  mind 


84  ETHICS 

ever  be  supposed  actually  to  contain  within  its  thoughts 
the  whole  moral  ideal  in  all  its  perfection  and  all  its 
detail  ;  and  it  will  be  adruitted  that  a  moral  ideal 
cannot  exist  out  of  a  mind.  If  human  (and  other 
similarly  limited)  minds  are  the  only  minds  there  are, 
the  moral  ideal  will  have  real  existence  in  so  far  as  such 
minds  actually  think  it ;  but  no  further.  Our  moral 
judgements  will  have  no  significance  for  the  Universe. 
They  will  tell  us  nothing  about  the  ultimate  nature  of 
things,  beyond  just  the  fact  that  certain  two-legged 
animals  in  "  one  of  the  meanest  of  the  planets  "  show 
more  or  less  tendency  to  think  and  judge  in  this  way. 
And  that  does  not  satisfactorily  account  for,  or  fully 
justify,  the  claim  that  the  moral  consciousness  makes 
for  objective  validity.  The  Theist,  on  the  other  hand, 
can  fully  justify  this  claim  because  for  him  his  own 
moral  judgements,  in  proportion  as  they  are  true  moral 
judgements,  will  represent  the  ideas  which  are  eternally 
present  to  the  Mind  from  whom  all  other  reahty  is 
derived.^  Consequently  our  ideal  of  "  the  good  "  may 
be  taken  as  expressing  (however  inadequately)  the  ulti- 
mate purpose  towards  which  the  Universe  is  directed. 
Such  a  view  of  the  Moral  Law  gives  a  very  different 
meaning  to  "  objective  validity  "  from  any  which  it  can 
possess  on  the  speculative  outlook  of  one  who  (but  for 
the  admission  of  really  acting  selves)  is  a  Materiahst,  a 
'  Naturahst  "  or  an  Agnostic  ;  and  it  tends  practically 
to  impress  this  idea  upon  the  mind  in  a  way  which  is 

1  It  would  take  us  too  far  away  from  our  subject  to  ask  how  far 
this  objectivity  can  be  secured  by  a  non-theistic  religion.  Cer- 
tainly philosophical  Buddhism  does  make  an  attempt  to  secure  it. 
There  have  been  religions,  or  at  least  one  religion,  without  a  God, 
but  never  a  religion  without  a  Metaphysic,  and  the  Metaphysic  of 
each  religion  is  closely  connected  with  its  Ethic.  Buddhism  gives 
an  objective  significance  to  Morality  by  holding  that  the  pheno- 
menal world  is  bad,  and  that  the  highest  Morality  represents  just 
the  way  of  escaping  from  this  badness  by  the  extinction  of  personal 
(perhaps  of  all)  consciousness.  This  might  be  a  satisfactory 
attempt  if  we  were  Pessimists. 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  85 

but  rarely  found  in  conjunction  "with  a  non-theistic 
creed.  The  theistic  explanation  of  the  Universe  does 
seem  to  be  logicall}^  demanded  by  our  consciousness  of 
duty  when  the  implications  of  that  consciousness  are 
fully  thought  out. 

The  question  may  be  asked,  ''  How  far  does  the  fact 
that  oiu-  behef  in  the  objectivity  of  the  Moral  Law  de- 
mands for  its  own  justification  a  theistic  explanation  of 
the  Universe  by  itself  constitute  a  reason  for  beUev- 
ing  that  explanation  to  be  actually  true  ? "  To  many 
minds — to  Cardinal  Newman,  for  instance — the  way  in 
which  the  dictates  of  Conscience  present  themselves  as 
"  commands  "  whose  obUgatoriness  is  quite  independent 
of  any  subjective  wish  or  incUnation  in  the  man  himself, 
has  seemed  by  itself  a  sufficient  proof  of  the  existence 
of  a  conscious  Intelligence  whose  commands  they  are. 
When  we  raise  the  question  whether  this  feeling  can  be 
regarded  as  a  strict  necessity  of  thought,  we  shall  prob- 
ably' find  it  difficult  or  impossible  to  isolate  this  par- 
ticular line  of  theistic  argument  from  all  others  ;  for  the 
improbability  of  supposing  that  something  Avhich  we  are 
compelled  or  strongly  incited  to  think  is  not  really  in 
accordance  with  the  actual  natm^e  of  things  depends 
upon  the  general  improbability  of  the  world  being  irra- 
tionally constituted.  If  there  were  good  reasons  for 
beUeving  that  the  world  is  a  mindless,  purposeless, 
meaningless  machine,  I  do  not  know  that  one  more 
irrational  feature  in  its  constitution  would  by  itself  be 
fatal  to  the  theory.  To  examhie  the  various  lines  of 
thought  wliich  lead  to  the  conclusion  that  the  Universe 
is  ultimately  spiritual,  and  that  the  theistic  explanation 
is  more  reasonable  than  any  other  spirituaUstic  theory, 
would  involve  a  complete  treatise  on  Metaphysic,  or  at 
least  upon  that  branch  of  it  commonly  kno^\•n  as  the 
Philosophy  of  Religion.  Here  it  must  suffice  to  point 
out :   (1)  that  the  fact  that  our  sense  of  moral  obHgation 


86  ETHICS 

finds  its  most  satisfactory  and  adequate  justification  in 
Theism  is  an  additional  and  a  very  strong  argument  in 
favour  of  that  creed  ;  (2)  that  the  existence  of  the  ]Moral 
Consciousness  constitutes  a  necessary  element  in  the 
argument  for  any  Theism  which  includes  the  doctrine 
that  God  is  good,  righteous,  or  loving.  It  is  because  we 
have  the  concept  of  "  good  "  that  we  are  justified  in  sup- 
posing that  it  must  be  valid  for  the  supreme  Mmd  from 
which  our  minds  are  derived,  just  as  we  suppose  that  the 
ultimate  principles  of  reasoning  and  the  axioms  of  Mathe- 
matics are  no  mere  human  ways  of  thinking,  but  hold 
good  for  God  and  for  all  rational  beings.  We  must 
therefore  supj)ose  that  the  course  of  the  world  is  directed 
towards  the  realization  of  a  good  of  which  our  moral 
ideal  is  a  revelation — inadequate  and  imperfect,  no  doubt, 
but  not  essentially  misleading.  And  this  is  the  strongest, 
if  it  is  not  the  only,  ground  for  that  faith  in  ImmortaHty 
which  constitutes  so  large  an  element  in  the  creed  of  all 
the  higher  and  more  ethical  rehgions.i  If  the  amount  of 
good  reahzed  in  human  life,  as  we  know  it,  is  inadequate 
to  account  for  and  to  justify  the  world's  existence  and 
all  the  evil  which  it  involves,  if  in  particular  the  capa- 
cities of  human  nature  seem  too  great  to  be  intended 
for  no  more  complete  realization  of  them  than  our  present 
life  affords,  at  least  for  the  vast  majority ;  if  moreover  the 
distribution  of  good  in  this  life  seems  to  be  a  quite  in- 
adequate satisfaction  of  our  ideal  of  Justice,  these  are 
good  reasons  for  supposing  that  this  life  is  but  a  dis- 
cipline or  education  for  a  Hfe  in  which  our  ideals,  or 
rather  that  true  ideal  of  wliich  our  own  are  fragmentary 
revelations,  will  find  an  adequate  and  satisfying  fulfil- 
ment.    The  strength  of   conviction  which  these  con- 

1  Buddhism  is  the  one  exception,  if  Nirvana  be  supposed  to 
imply  a  mere  relapse  into  unconsciousness,  but  this  is  a  state 
•which  the  ordinary  man  can  only  hope  to  attain  after  many  re- 
incarnations. 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  87 

siderations  will  carry  with  them  will  depend  upon  the 
strength  of  our  faith  in  the  ultimate  rationahty  of  the 
Universe.  We  may  hesitate  as  to  whether  we  ought 
without  quahfication  to  describe  the  ideas  of  God  and 
Immortality  as  "postulates  of  Morahty,"  but  they  cer- 
tainly represent  the  view  of  the  Universe  to  wliich  the 
belief  in  the  objective  vahdity  of  our  moral  judgements 
naturally  leads  up,  and  which  gives  the  idea  of  objec- 
tivity a  fullness  of  meaning  wliich  it  could  not  other^wise 
claim.  Without  these  beliefs  Morality  is  objectively 
valid  in  the  sense  that  it  represents  something  which 
we  necessarily  think  true ;  with  them  it  is  objective  in 
the  further  sense  that  they  represent  a  Law  in  accord- 
ance with  which  the  Universe  is  actuall}^  governed. 

When  we  turn  from  the  question,  "  How  far  are  any 
particular  metaphysical  or  theological  behefs  impUed  or 
required  by  a  reasonable  theory  of  Ethics  "  to  the  ques- 
tion, "  What  is  in  practice  the  moral  value  or  influence  of 
Rehgion?"  we  are  entermg  upon  quite  another  enquiry, 
and  one  for  which  we  have  httle  space  left.  Nevertheless, 
it  may  not  be  out  of  place  to  suggest  a  few  of  the  ways  in 
which  Religion  in  its  great  historical  manifestations  has 
exercised  and  still  exercises  a  moral  influence  which  has 
never  been  exercised — and  probabl}^  never  will  be  exer- 
cised— on  a  large  scale  by  any  purely  ethical  system. 

L  Although  the  intrinsic  obUgation  of  Morahty  would 
not  altogether  disappear  if  we  adopted  a  purelj'  agnostic, 
or  a  purely  materiaUstic,  theory  of  the  Universe  (so  far  as 
is  consistent  with  the  admission  of  a  really  active  self), 
the  meaning  of  moral  obligation  would,  as  has  been  con- 
tended, be  profoundly  modified.  And  even  if  this  were 
not  so,  its  practical  infiuence  would  be  immeasurably 
less.  Though  the  behcf  in  an  objectively  vaUd  law  may 
be  speculatively  possible  \\athout  Rehgion,  or  at  all  events 
without  theistic  Rehgion,  Theism  represent-s  the  form  in 
which  that  belief  has  exercised  the  strongest  influence 


88  ETHICS 

upon  great  masses  of  men.  A  law  which  represents  the 
law  of  the  Universe  is  hkely  to  inspire  more  respect  than 
one  which  has  no  existence  outside  the  minds  of  certain 
human  beings. 

2.  The  behef  in  God  and  ImmortaUty  suppHes  us  with 
a  ground  for  beheving  that  the  end  which  the  moral  con- 
sciousness sets  before  us  as  the  end  which  ought  to  be 
attained,  is  also  an  end  which  can  be  and  will  ultimately 
be  attained.  It  is  possible,  no  doubt,  to  strive  after  the 
diminution  of  evil  in  a  world  which  is  essentially  evil ; 
but  it  is  obvious  that  such  a  view  of  the  relation  between 
our  ideals  and  the  Universe  in  which  they  have  to  be 
reahzed  is  in  the  highest  degree  depressing  to  moral 
effort.  On  the  other  hand,  the  religious  view  of  the 
Universe  is  the  one  which  is  most  favourable  to  the 
awakening  of  such  energies.  It  is  that  view  of  the 
Universe  which  affords  the  maximum  encouragement  to 
the  supremacy  of  spiritual  and  universal  interests  over 
purely  personal  and  natural  ones.  It  would  be  better, 
doubtless,  to  be  unselfish  and  spiritually-minded  for  a 
day  than  to  be  selfish  and  base  for  a  millennimn  ;  but 
it  is  scarcely  possible  to  exaggerate  the  degree  to  which 
the  importance  of  the  moral  life  is  enhanced  when  it  is 
thought  of  as  the  first  stage  in  a  progress  towards  a 
higher  life  of  boundless  potentiahties  for  the  individual 
himself  and  for  others.^ 

3.  It  has  been  contended  in  the  above  pages  that 
Morahty  ultimately  depends  upon  certain  self-evident 
truths.  But  self-evident  truths  are  not  truths  which  are 
evident  to  everyone.  The  higher  moral  ideals  have  in 
the  first  instance  been  recognized  by  exceptional  mmds, 
by  the  few  rather  than  the  many ;  and  to  the  last  the 
average  man  is  largely  dependent  for  the  recognition  of 

1  No  doubt  forms  of  religious  belief  not  including  belief  in  a  per- 
sonal God  or  Immortality  aim  at  supplying  the  same  assurance.  It 
is  questionable  whether  they  have  been  or  can  be  equally  successful. 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  89 

tliein  on  the  superior  insight  of  such  higher  minds.  It 
has  been  said  that  the  great  Artist  lets  us  see  things 
through  his  eyes  ;  it  is  by  a  study  of  the  works  of  great 
Masters  in  the  past  that  even  the  Artist,  still  more  the 
average  man,  is  helped  to  develope  such  sesthetic  capa- 
cities as  he  possesses.  What  is  true  of  Art  is  equally  or 
still  more  true  of  Morahty — still  more  so  because  here 
the  influence  of  the  higher  minds  is  commonly  a  condi- 
tion, not  merely  of  the  awakening  in  the  individual  of 
the  power  to  see  what  is  right,  but  of  the  inclination  to 
do  it.  Among  these-  superior  minds  the  first  place  is 
occupied  by  the  Founders  and  Reformers,  the  Apostles 
and  the  Prophets  of  the  higher  reUgions.  The  great 
historical  religions  represent  the  most  important  means 
by  which  the  higher  moral  ideals  are  communicated  to 
the  many.  On  the  view  which  has  been  taken  in  this 
chapter  as  to  the  relation  between  certain  theories  of 
the  Universe  and  certain  views  of  the  moral  ideal,  it  is 
no  mere  accident  that  every  one  of  these  Rehgions 
represents  both  a  theory  of  the  LMverse  and  an  ethical 
ideal.  That  this  has  been  so  in  the  past  is  an  undeniable 
historical  fact  :  if  the  view  be  a  well-founded  one,  it  is 
likely  that  it  will  be  so — to  a  considerable  extent  at 
least — in  the  future.  It  is  true  that  in  past  times  the 
belief  m  revelations  of  this  kind  has  been  associated  with 
a  beUef  in  a  supernatural  communication  of  ethical  and 
reUgious  truth,  as  it  were  from  the  outside,  to  great 
reUgious  personalities — a  communication  often  thought 
to  have  been  guaranteed  by  miraculous  interferences 
with  the  course  of  nature.  For  reasons  which  it  \^'ould 
be  out  of  place  to  go  into  here,  it  is  likely  that  the  behef 
in  different  measures  and  degrees  of  divdne  self -revela- 
tion will  m  the  future  be  less  and  less  dependent  upon 
such  pre -suppositions.  But  the  ethical  influence  of 
Rehgion  is  hkely  to  be  none  the  less  great  because  the 
revelation  will  be  more  and  more  accepted  on  account 


90  ETHICS 

of  its  intrinsic  power  to  satisfy  the  ethical  and  reUgious 
aspu'ations  of  the  behever.  If  any  historical  religion  is 
destined  to  be  accepted  in  the  modern  world  as  the  final 
or  absolute  religion,  it  will  be  because  its  fundamental 
rehgious  and  ethical  ideas  commend  themselves  to 
Reason  and  Conscience  as  intrinsically  the  highest,  the 
most  capable  of  being  sej^arated  from  the  hmitations 
and  the  unscientific  beliefs  with  which  they  have  been 
associated  in  its  actual  history,  and  of  absorbing  into 
itself  the  highest  spiritual  achievements  of  later  ages. 

4.  The  earher  forms  of  Rehgion  were  essentially 
national  reUgions.  It  is  one  of  the  characteristics  by 
which  the  higher  religions  are  differentiated  from  the 
lower  that  they  are  universal  rehgions.  They  claim  the 
allegiance  of  all  human  beings  on  the  ground  of  their 
intrinsic  truth.  And  it  is  a  further  consequence  of  this 
claim  that  the  adherents  of  such  a  rehgion  constitute  a 
community  not  identical  A^ith  the  nation  or  the  state, 
though  in  point  of  fact  such  communities  have  often  been 
very  closely  associated  with  the  pohtical  organization. 
Such  communities  or  Churches  have  been,  to  a  very  large 
extent,  the  means  by  which  the  higher  ideals  of  conduct 
have  been  kept  ahve,  propagated,  and  further  developed 
in  modem  times.  Such  communities  might  of  course 
conceivably  be  established  on  a  purely  ethical  basis ; 
but  the  close  union  which  subsists  between  men's  moral 
ideals  and  their  theories  about  the  ultimate  nature  of 
things  makes  it  probable  that  the  societies  which  exercise 
the  most  powerful  influence  upon  the  life  of  humanity 
wiU  be  in  the  future,  as  they  have  been  m  the  past, 
societies  which  represent  some  definite  \aew  of  man's 
relation  with  the  Universe  as  well  as  some  definite  j)re- 
sentation  of  the  ethical  ideal. 

These  are  a  few  of  the  reasons  which  lead  the  present 
writer  to  believe  that  the  association  between  particular 
ethical  ideals  and  particular  ways  of  conceiving  man's 


MORALITY    AND    RELIGION  91 

relation  to  the  L''^niverse  is  no  mere  accident  of  history, 
but  is  likely  to  be  a  permanent  feature  of  human  thought, 
whatever  changes  may  hereafter  take  place  in  the  actual 
content  either  of  the  moral  ideals  accepted  or  of  the  more 
strictly  theological  or  metaphysical  side  of  the  creeds 
with  which  they  are  connected.  If  this  view  be  well 
founded,  it  is  clear  that  it  will  have  a  most  important 
bearing  upon  the  much  agitated  question  of  the  best  way 
of  communicating  ethical  instruction.  From  this  point 
of  view  it  will  appear  that,  while  purely  ethical  instnic- 
tion  is  possible,  and  may  under  certain  conditions  have  a 
certain  value,  it  is  prima  facie  unnatural  to  separate 
ethical  teaching  from  instruction  about  the  ultimate 
relation  of  man  to  the  Universe.  If  the  idea  of  an 
objective  validity  in  our  ethical  ideals  naturally  leads  up 
to  the  idea  of  God  and  acquires  a  fuller  meaning  from 
that  idea,  it  will  be  unnatural  and  practically  undesirable 
that  the  attempt  should  be  made  to  teach  the  idea  of 
Duty  in  disconnection  from  the  idea  of  God.  Moreover, 
since  in  point  of  fact  the  highest  moral  teaching  of  the 
world  has  been  given  in  close  association  with  religious 
ideas,  the  moral  teacher  A\ill  be  at  a  disadvantage  "\^ho 
is  forbidden  to  connect  his  moral  teaching  Avith  the 
current  embodiments  of  the  world's  highest  spiritual 
experiences — M-ith  the  great  personalities,  the  rehgious 
books,  and  the  religious  institutions  in  which  they  have 
found  expression.  It  must  not  be  supposed  that  the 
practical  difficulties  which  arise  from  the  actual  diver- 
gence of  religious  opmion  in  most  modem  communities 
is  absent  from  the  attempt  to  give  purely  ethical  instruc- 
tion in  Schools.  There  are  nearly  as  manj^  differences 
of  opinion  about  Ethics  as  there  are  about  Theology — 
in  particular  the  vast  difierence  which  separates  those 
moralists  who  do  and  those  who  do  not  believe  in  the 
objective  validity  of  Duty.  Many  people  would  be  more 
disposed  to  favour  the  project  of  introducing  purely 


92  ETHICS 

ethical  teaching  in  schools  if  they  could  be  sure  that  the 
teaching  would  always  include  a  recognition  of  this 
fundamental  idea.  Some  of  the  model  lessons  which 
have  been  put  forth  to  illustrate  the  possibility  and  value 
of  ethical  teaching  are  eminently  calculated  to  awaken 
doubts  as  to  whether  the  ethical  instruction  which  is 
likely  to  be  given  under  these  conditions  will  always  be 
based  upon  a  belief  in  the  categorical  Imperative. 

It  will  be  desirable  to  conclude  by  summing  up  the  view 
which  has  been  taken  in  this  chapter  as  to  the  relation 
between  Ethics  and  Metaphysics  (including  Theology)  : 

1.  Morality  cannot  be  based  upon  or  deduced  from 
any  metaphysical  or  theological  proposition  whatever. 
The  moral  judgement  is  ultimate  and  immediate.  Putting 
this  into  more  popular  language,  the  immediate  recog- 
nition that  I  ought  to  act  in  a  certain  way  suppHes  a 
sufficient  reason  for  so  acting  entirely  apart  from  any- 
thing else  that  I  may  believe  about  the  ultimate  nature 
of  things. 

2.  But  the  recognition  of  the  validity  of  Moral  ObHga- 
tion  in  general  or  of  any  particular  moral  judgement 
logically  implies  the  belief  in  a  permanent  spiritual  self 
which  is  really  the  cause  of  its  own  actions.  Such  a 
behef  is  in  the  strictest  sense  a  postulate  of  Morahty. 

3.  The  beHef  in  God  is  not  a  postulate  of  Morality  in 
such  a  sense  that  the  rejection  of  it  involves  a  denial  of 
all  meaning  or  vahdity  to  our  moral  judgements,  but  the 
acceptance  or  rejection  of  this  behef  does  materially 
affect  the  sense  which  we  give  to  the  idea  of  obHgation. 
The  behef  in  the  objectivity  of  moral  judgements  imphes 
that  the  moral  law  is  recognized  as  no  merely  accidental 
element  in  the  construction  of  the  human  mind,  but  as 
an  ultimate  fact  about  the  Universe.  This  rational  de- 
mand cannot  be  met  by  any  merely  materialistic  or  natu- 
ralistic Metaphysic,  and  is  best  satisfied  by  a  theory  which 
explains  the  world  as  an  expression  of  an  intrinsically 


MORALITY   AND    RELIGION  93 

righteous  rational  Will,  and  the  moral  consciousness  as 
an  imperfect  revelation  of  the  ideal  towards  which  that 
Will  is  directed.  The  belief  in  God  may  be  described  as 
a  postulate  of  Morality  in  a  less  strict  or  secondary  sense. 

4.  So  far  from  Ethics  being  based  upon  or  deduced 
from  Theology,  a  rational  Theology  is  largely  based  upon 
Etliics  :  since  the  moral  Consciousness  sup})lies  us  with 
all  the  knowledge  we  possess  as  to  the  action,  character, 
and  direction  of  the  supreme  Will,  and  forms  an  im- 
portant element  in  the  argument  for  the  existence  of  such 
a  WiU. 

5.  We  must  peremptorily  reject  the  view  that  the 
obligation  of  MoraHty  depends  upon  sanctions,  i.e.  re- 
ward and  punishment,  in  tliis  life  or  any  other.  But,  as 
the  beUef  in  an  objective  moral  law  naturally  leads  up 
to  and  requires  for  its  full  justification  the  idea  of  God, 
so  the  idea  of  God  involves  the  belief  in  Immortality  if 
the  present  life  seems  an  inadequate  fulfilment  of  the 
moral  ideal.  In  ways  which  need  not  be  recapitulated, 
we  have  seen  that  it  is  practically  a  belief  eminently 
favourable  to  the  maximum  influence  of  the  moral  ideal 
on  fife. 

The  whole  position  may  perhaps  be  still  more  simply 
summed  up.  It  is  possible  for  a  man  to  know  his  duty, 
and  to  achieve  considerable  success  in  doing  it,  without 
any  beUef  in  God  or  Immortality  or  any  of  the  other 
behefs  commonly  spoken  of  as  religious  ;  but  he  is 
likely  to  know  and  do  it  better  if  he  accepts  a  view  of 
the  Universe  which  includes  as  its  most  fundamental 
articles  these  two  beliefs.  It  must  not  be  supposed,  of 
course,  that  no  other  bcUefs  taught  in  the  historical 
religions  are  of  anj^  importance  for  the  moral  life.  In 
particular  the  concrete  embodiments  which  all  the 
higher  Religions  have  attempted  to  give  to  the  moral 
ideal  in  the  great  rehgious  personalities  which  they 
reverence,  in  their  sacred  books  and  rehgious  institutions, 


94  ETHICS 

represent  the  raost  powerful  of  the  spiritual  influences 
by  which  the  moral  life  of  the  individual  soul  is  awakened, 
sustained,  and  developed.  That  this  is  pre-eminently- 
true  of  Christianit}^  will  hardly  be  denied.  In  no  other 
Religion  does  the  influence  of  the  Founder's  character 
count  for  so  much.  It  would  be  obviously  beyond  the 
scQ-pe  of  this  book  to  examine  the  actual  truth  or  the 
actual  influence  of  the  moral  ideals  embodied  in  any 
particular  Religion,  or  of  the  other  beUefs  with  which 
those  ideals  are  associated.  Such  a  task  belongs  to 
Theology,  or  the  Philosophy  of  Religion  ;  but  one  of 
the  most  important  data  upon  which  the  Theologian  has 
to  proceed  is  supplied  by  Ethics  or  Moral  Philosophy,  or 
rather  by  the  contents  of  that  moral  consciousness  which 
it  is  the  business  of  the  Moral  Philosopher  to  analyse. 
It  will  be  enough  to  say  here  that  it  is  a  condition  of  the 
acceptance  of  any  religious  system  as  the  highest  and 
truest  that  the  moral  ideal  with  which  it  presents  us  is 
in  harmony  with  the  deliverances  of  the  developed  and 
enlightened  moral  consciousness.  A  reasonable  defence 
of  the  claim  that  Christianity  is  the  final  or  (as  Hegel 
called  it)  "  the  absolute  Religion "  would  be  largely 
occupied  with  the  attempt  to  show  that  it  satisfies  this 
condition  in  a  way  which  no  other  of  the  historical 
Religions  can  succeed  in  doing. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The  course  of  study  to  be  recommended  to  the  student  who 
wishes  to  follow  up  his  reading  of  this  httle  book  must  depend  a 
good  deal  upon  the  extent  of  his  ambition.  Ethics  is  a  branch  of 
Philosophy  in  which  some  knowledge  of  the  past  history  of  the 
subject  is  of  especial  importance,  and  yet  it  is  one  in  which  the  newer 
books  do  not  necessarily  imply  much  acquaintance  with  the  older. 
It  should  be  recognized  that  a  thorough  insight  into  the  subject 
is  hardly  possible  without  some  knowledge  of  general  philosophy, 
and  the  more  metaphysical  writers — especially  Kant,  the  most 
famous  of  all  ethical  writers — will  be  found  difficult,  and  perhaps 
not  fully  intelligible,  without  some  such  knowledge.  It  should  be 
added  that  most  of  the  great  philosophers  deal  with  Ethics  inci- 
dentally. Spinoza's  Ethics,  though  it  bears  that  title,  reall\-  contains 
a  whole  metaphysic,  and  the  strictly  ethical  part  can  Kardly  be 
read  to  much  advantage  by  itself. 

Elementary  Text-Books. — Mackenzie,  Manual  of  Ethics  ;  Muir- 
head,  Ehments  of  Ethics  ;  d'Arcy  (Bishop  of  Down),  A  Short  Study 
of  Ethics  ;  Seth,  A  Study  of  Ethical  Principles.  The  first  three 
works  are  more  or  less  "  Hegehan  "  in  tendency  ;  the  last  repre- 
sents another  type  of  Idealistic  Philosophy.  The  student  may  begin 
with  one  of  these.  But  there  is  something  to  be  said  for  reading 
at  once,  as  classical  representatives  of  the  two  traditional  ways  of 
thinking  on  the  subject,  Butler's  Fifteen  Sermons  and  MiU"s  Utili- 
tarianism, together  with  the  first  chapter  of  Lecky's  History  of 
European  Morals,  which  contains  a  short  sketch  of  the  history  of 
ethical  thought,  and  then  going  on  to  one  or  more  of  the  longer 
works — for  instance,  Sidgwick  and  Grote  (see  below).  Green  should 
certainly  be  included  in  any  serious  course  of  study,  but  it  is  well 
to  postpone  him  till  the  student  has  acquired  some  clear  knowledge 
of  the  questions  at  issue. 

The  Older  Moral  Philosophy. — Anyone  who  wishes  to  trace 
the  development  of  Moral  Philosophy  should  read  Hobbes,  Levia- 
than (early  chapters)  ;  Gudworth,  Treatise  concerning  Eternal  arid 
Immutable  Morality ;  Clarke,  Boyle  Lectures  on  The  Being  and  Attri- 
butes of  God  (second  part);  Locke',  Essay,  Bk.  I.  chap,  iii.;  Shaftesbury, 
Inquiry  concerning  Virtue;  Hutcheson,  Inquiry  concerning  Moral 
Good  and  Evil  ;  Hume,  Inquiry  concerning  Morals  ;  Bishop  Butler, 
Fifteen  Sermons  ;  Eeid,  Inquiry  into  the  Human  Mind  ;  Price,  Beview 

95 


96  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

o/  ihe  Principal  Questions  in  florals.  The  last  is  one  of  the  best 
of  the  older  morahsts  ;  his  thought  is  singularly  like  that  of  Kant 
at  his  best,  ■without  his  absurdities  and  exaggerations. 

Sidgwick's  short  History  of  EUiics  may  be  strongly  recommended. 

Modern  Writers. — J.  S.  Mill,  Utilitarianism ;  Sidgwick,  The 
Methods  of  Ethics ;  John  Grote,  Examination  of  the  Utilitarian 
Philosophy ;  Moore,  Principia  Ethica ;  Taylor,  The  Problein,  of 
Conduct  ;  Gizycki  and  Coit,  Manual  of  Ethical  Philosophy  ;  Paulsen, 
System  of  Ethics  (Eng.  trans.) ;  Rashdall,  The  Theory  of  Good  and 
Evil. 

More  Metaphysical  Writers. — Kant,  Theory  of  Ethics  (the 
more  important  ethical  writings  translated  by  Abbott) ;  Green,  Pro- 
legomena  to  Ethics  ;  Bradley,  Ethical  Stvdies. 

Representatives  of  Evolutioxary  or  Naturalistic  Ethics. — 
Spenoer,  Principles  of  Ethics  ;  Leshe  Stephen,  Science  of  Ethics ; 
Alexander,  Moral  Order  and  Progress  ;  Westermarck,  Origin  and 
Development  of  Moral  Ideals  (chiefly  an  anthropological  enquiry  into 
the  history  of  morality) ;  McDougaU,  Social  Psychology.  L.  T. 
Hobhouse,  Morals  in  Evolution,  gives  a  much  more  philosophical 
view  of  the  development  of  Morality  than  Westermarck,  if  based  on 
leae  original  research  :  his  view  of  Ethics  c^n  hardly  be  called 
"  naturalistic."  As  a  criticism  of  the  more  naturahstic  writers, 
Sorley's  Ethics  of  Naturalism  may  be  mentioned.  Cf.  also  Sidgwick, 
The  Ethics  of  T.  H.  Green,  Herbert  Spencer  and  Martineau. 

This  list  does  not  pretend  to  be  more  than  introductory,  and 
many  writers  of  great  importance  are  deliberately  omitted,  as  a 
long  list  is  apt  to  be  confusing  to  the  beginner.  Further  references 
to  the  modem  hterature  of  the  subject  will  be  found  in  the  author's 
Theory  of  Good  and  Eml.  Dewey  and  Tufte,  Ethics,  contains  very 
full  lists  of  modern  books. 


Printed  by  Ballanttne,  Hanson  Sa*  Co. 
Edinburgh  &-•  London 

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